Sam Taylor (born 1970) is a British author, translator and former pop culture correspondent for The Observer, a job he left in 2001. His first book, The Republic of Trees, was published in 2005 and received critical acclaim. His second novel, The Amnesiac, tells the story of James Purdew, a man obsessed with uncovering the events of three years of his life about which he remembers nothing. Taylor lives in Texas with his family. Taylor, along with Laurent Binet won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2022 for his translation of Binet's novel Civilizations.

The Amnesiac

His 2007 book The Amnesiac includes the fictional main character James Purdew and a character named Tomas Ryal a Czech philosopher, playwright and poet, who is described as living from 1900 to 1973 and is famous for his controversial repudiation of the existence of memory, and also for the mysterious manner of his death. It is assumed that he was pupil of a famous Czech pedagogist, philosopher and inventor Jára da Cimrman. Ryal was given an entry at the Encyclopedia Labyrinthus.

Translations

Taylor also works as a translator, from French to English. These are some of the works he has translated: