Youd was educated at Peter Symonds' School in Winchester, Hampshire, then served in the Royal Corps of Signals from 1941 to 1946.

A scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation made it possible for him to pursue a writing career, beginning with The Winter Swan (Dennis Dobson, 1949), published under the name Christopher Youd.

[2] His second novel under the Christopher pseudonym, The Death of Grass (Michael Joseph, 1956) was Youd's first major success as a writer.

[1] In 1976 he won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis, youth fiction category, for the same novel in its German translation, Die Wächter.

[4] Youd lived for many years in Rye, East Sussex and died in Bath, Somerset, on 3 February 2012, of complications from bladder cancer.

[7][8] Later, in 2013, a TV pilot based loosely on The Lotus Caves was developed by Bryan Fuller and titled High Moon.