Colin M.Turnbull is a Connecticut-based author who was born in London. He attended Westminster School and Oxford's Magdalen College, where he majored in philosophy and politics. After serving in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve during WWII, he received a two-year research grant at Banaras Hindu University in India's Department of Indian Religion and Philosophy, and then went to Oxford to study anthropology with a focus on Africa. He has traveled to Africa on five separate occasions, the most recent of which was spent primarily in the Republic of Zare. He drew material for his first book, The Forest People, a three-year chronicle of his time with the Pygmies of Zare, from these excursions.

Turnbull was a professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he taught anthropology. He is a Corresponding Member of Le Musée Royal d'Afrique Centrale and a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.