The son of a Lancashire cotton mill owner in Bolton, Greater Manchester, Taylor was educated at Gresham's School, Holt.

Under the name Ken Taylor, he has written the scripts for some hundred hours of television drama in a career spanning more than four decades.

In 1964 The Devil and John Brown received the Best Original Teleplay Award of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. In the same year, Taylor was named Writer of the Year by the Guild of Television Writers and Directors (later BAFTA) for his trilogy of television plays The Seekers.

The Jewel in the Crown, adapted from Paul Scott's Raj Quartet novels as a fifteen-hour mini-series, earned Ken Taylor an Emmy nomination in 1984 along with the award as Writer of the Year from the Royal Television Society, while his adaptation of Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn (1992) received a BAFTA nomination. His adaptation credits also include Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, The Melancholy Hussar by Thomas Hardy, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd by D. H. Lawrence, The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West and The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark, and The Devil's Crown.

In 1953, Taylor married Gillian Dorothea Black and they have two sons and two daughters. One son is the Liberal Democrat politician Matthew Taylor.