Grace Jackson has spent most of her adult life trying to understand China - an intellectual journey that ultimately led to Taiwan. A fluent Mandarin speaker and a trained historian, Grace was born in southwest England and educated at Cambridge and Harvard. After graduating with a double first from Cambridge, she spent a year at Harvard as a visiting student, and later returned to Harvard to earn an MA in East Asian Studies as the recipient of a Frank Knox Fellowship. In between, Grace spent two years in Taiwan, exploring the island while studying Mandarin at National Taiwan University in Taipei.

For the past decade, she has amassed a range of professional experiences in the Greater China region, from leading study-abroad trips for American teenagers in Taiwan's high-mountain villages, to leading marketing efforts for a multinational corporation in the futuristic megacity of Shenzhen. She has returned to Taiwan every year (interrupted only by the Covid pandemic) since her first stint there in 2010, most recently for research towards Beautiful Island. She now lives in the Lake District.