By Charlie Pike
From our June 2025 issue
Last year, a bidding war broke out at the London Book Fair over St. Albans native Austin Taylor’s debut novel. In the end, a seven-figure deal was struck for the North American rights to Notes on Infinity (Celadon Books; hardcover; $29.99) and a forthcoming novel. A love story about a pair of Harvard chemistry students who invent an antiaging drug and launch a biotech startup, Notes on Infinity draws on 26-year-old Taylor’s own experience at Harvard, where she was one of only two students ever to double major in chemistry and English. After graduating in 2021, she deferred admission to Harvard Law School to write her book. Now, she’s heading to Stanford Law School in the fall, where she plans to study the impacts of artificial intelligence on storytelling.
Taylor’s interests are wide-ranging. (She’s also a private pilot and a Registered Maine Guide.) But writing has long been a through line. At age 10, she was penning “silly pieces of fiction” at her family’s Embden Pond camp, and, at Harvard, a class on American fiction inspired her to broaden her field of study. She spent last summer holed up at the camp, making final revisions to her novel. “It was the perfect place to wrap things up,” Taylor says. “Thinking about how excited the young me would have been to see what I was up to so many years later was pretty special.”
