Roger Taylor was born in Heywood, Lancashire, England and now lives in the Wirral. He is a chartered civil and structural engineer, a pistol, rifle and shotgun shooter, an instructor/student in a highly personalised form of aikido (heavily influenced by tai chi and systema) and, not least, an enthusiastic and loud but bone-jarringly inaccurate piano player.Ostensibly fantasy, his major work - the twelve books of the 'Chronicles of Hawklan' - is much more than it seems and has been called 'subtly subversive'. He has also written Aikido - More Than a Martial Art, the fantasy novel The Keep, and Travellers which is science fiction.