Scott Taylor (born 1960) is a former soldier (3 years in the infantry) Canadian journalist, writer and publisher who specializes in military journalism and war reporting. His coverage has included wars in Cambodia, Africa, the Persian Gulf, Turkey, South Ossetia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Scott Taylor is also a former private in the Canadian Forces, PPCLI. He has worked as the editor and publisher of Esprit de Corps, since 1988. Taylor has aroused a certain amount of controversy during his career; described as "fiercely opinionated", his articles have attracted criticism for their often strongly polemical slant. He has been critical of the Canadian Forces and the Department of National Defence, and has also written in opposition to Western involvement in the Kosovo War, Iraq War and the Libyan Civil War. Taylor has won Press TV's ' Unembedded Journalist of the Year' Award for 2008. Taylor is a regular op-ed contributor to the Halifax Herald newspaper, as well as the Embassy Magazine. He has also contributed to such publications as the Ottawa Citizen, 'Maclean’s magazine, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Sun, Reader's Digest and the Global television network. He has also appeared in several international journals such as Indian Defense Review, Mayar Nemzet and Al Jazeera. In 2006, Scott Taylor presented to the University of Western Ontario his Clissold Lecture titled From Belgrade to Baghdad. Taylor appears regularly in Canadian media as a military expert and analyst. In 1996 he received the Quill Award, as well as the Alexander MacKenzie Award for journalistic excellence. In 2004, Taylor and a Turkish colleague Zeynep Tugrul were kidnapped in Iraq by Ansar al-Islam, a radical Islamist group and held for five days. His release generated a wave of international media coverage and he returned to Iraq in 2005, briefing the U.S soldiers stationed there on the Turkmen people of Iraq. Early years of Esprit de Corps Scott Taylor's Canadian military magazine, Esprit de Corps, was first conceived of as an in-flight magazine for the Canadian Air Force, after Scott Taylor and his wife Katherine Taylor discovered that Canadian Air Force planes lacked any on-board entertainment system or reading material. Their original concept was to utilize the military passengers who normally used the airlines to attract advertisers who wished to promote their products to Canadian Forces personnel. After struggling to have his proposal accepted by the Canadian Forces, Scott Taylor was able