Kate Taylor is an award-winning novelist and an arts columnist at The Globe and Mail.
 
The daughter of a Canadian diplomat, Taylor was born in France and raised in Ottawa and Europe. She studied history and art history at the University of Toronto, and completed a Masters in journalism at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.
 
Taylor worked at the London Free Press and Hamilton Spectator before joining the copy desk at The Globe and Mail in 1989. She became an arts reporter at that paper in 1991 and served as The Globe’s authoritative and provocative theatre critic from 1995-2003, winning two Nathan Cohen Awards and a nomination for a National Newspaper Award. Since 2003, she has worked as a columnist, critic and feature writer in The Globe’s arts section, with a special interest in cultural policy. In 2009 Taylor was awarded the prestigious Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy for a project entitled Maple Leaf Rag: Canadian Cultural Sovereignty in the Digital Age, examining how a national culture can survive the forces of digitization and globalization.
 
Taylor’s debut 2003 novel Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen was a national bestseller, winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Canada-Caribbean region), The City of Toronto Book Award and the Canadian Jewish Book Award. A Man in Uniform is her second novel. She lives in Toronto with her husband and son.
 
Of her decision to set both novels in Paris, Taylor says:
 
“The experience of living in Paris and attending a French school as a teenager instilled in me a great affection for a beautiful city but also made me Canadian because, at a certain point, you have to choose where you belong. My first novel, Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, was about the struggle to belong, about feeling torn between two worlds or two languages. It seems to me a very Canadian theme because we are a bilingual country and a country of immigrants. A Man in Uniform is set in Paris a little more coincidentally because the Dreyfus Affair happened to be an episode of French history that has always intrigued me. When I was researching my first novel I realized that it had the plot of a great detective novel.”