Michelle Paver's Biography

Paver's parents were journalists. Her father ran the Nyasaland Times and her mother wrote a gossip column.

The Paver family moved to England in 1963 when she was still young and Michelle grew up in Wimbledon.

Michelle Paver studied biochemistry at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and got a first but decided against a career in science and became a lawyer.

Having whetted her appetite for a different lifestyle with a sabbatical during which she wrote the first draft of Without Charity, Michelle Paver found she could not settle down to the busy city solicitor life and resigned from her firm. Not long afterwards she secured a publishing contract.

Other books followed Without Charity, including A Place in the Hills, which was shortlisted for the 2002 Parker Pen Romantic Novel of the Year award.

Michelle Paver then wrote the Eden trilogy's first book The Shadow Catcher.

In the end, Michelle Paver became best known not for her historical fiction, but for her children's books, The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, featuring Wolf Brother, Spirit Walker and Soul Eater.

In October 2010 Michelle Paver won The Guardian Children's Fiction Prize for Ghost Hunter, the sixth and final book in her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series.