Taylor Cole grew up on a council estate in Devon and is of Armenian heritage, via her maternal grandmother who survived the Armenian genocide as a child refugee. When she was twenty-one, Taylor left university to run away to Cyprus and live in a men’s barrack block with her military boyfriend, but returned the next year to finish her BA in English, which she followed with a master’s degree in Creative Writing. She lives in Newquay with her boyfriend-turned-husband, two daughters and an eighty-year-old tortoise called Shelley who was found wandering the streets of Plymouth in 1958.