Taylor Swift: A Biography

Taylor Swift is an American singer-songwriter. One of the world's leading contemporary recording artists, she is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Swift moved to Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 14 to pursue a career in country music. She signed with the label Big Machine Records and became the youngest artist ever signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house. Her 2006 self-titled debut album peaked at number five on the Billboard 200 and spent the most weeks on the chart in the 2000s. The album's third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Hot Country Songs chart.

Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008. Buoyed by the success of pop crossover singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", Fearless became the best-selling album of 2009 in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, with Swift becoming the youngest Album of the Year winner. As a songwriter, Swift has received awards from the Nashville Songwriters Association and the Songwriters Hall of Fame and was included in Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time in 2015. She is also the recipient of 10 Grammys, six Guinness World Records, one Emmy Award, 23 Billboard Music Awards, and 12 Country Music Association Awards.

Swift is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 40 million albums - including 27.8 million in the US - and 130 million single downloads. She has appeared in Time's 100 most influential people in the world (2010 and 2015), Forbes' top-earning women in music (2011-2015), Forbes' 100 most powerful women (2015), and Forbes' Celebrity 100 (2016). Her inclusion in the third of these made her the youngest woman on the list, and she ranked first in Celebrity 100.