Michelle Paver.

Michelle Paver was born in Malawi to a South African father and a Belgian mother, and moved to London as a child. She read biochemistry at Oxford, where an early story about a boy and a wolf was quietly shelved as she learned her craft, and went on to spend thirteen years as a City lawyer, eventually making partner while running multi-million-pound litigation. Her father’s death in 1996 proved a turning point: she took a sabbatical, finished the draft of her first novel, Without Charity, and resigned before a publishing deal was even in hand. That debut was named one of WH Smith’s Fresh Talent titles in 2000, and Michelle has never looked back.

Her breakthrough came with Wolf Brother, the story she had abandoned two decades earlier and rediscovered at the back of a cupboard. Published in 2004 to instant acclaim, it launched Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, the nine-book saga of a boy, a girl and a wolf cub surviving a vividly realised Stone Age haunted by demons and the malevolent Soul-Eaters. The series has sold over three million copies across thirty-eight territories, won The Guardian Prize for Children’s Fiction, been recorded in full as acclaimed audiobooks by Sir Ian McKellen, and had its film rights optioned by Sir Ridley Scott. Anthony Horowitz called Wolf Brother a book with “the three qualities of a classic children’s book. Attractive characters. Relentless pace. And superb writing,” while Amanda Craig in The Times described it as “the kind of story you dream of reading and all too rarely find.”

Michelle’s passion for research is legendary and lends her fiction its unmistakable authenticity. To make her worlds real she has travelled to Siberia, the Arctic, the Himalayas, the English fenlands and the rainforests of South America, swimming with wild killer whales and, on one memorable occasion, licking a giant slug in the Alaskan woods (“a Native American cure for toothache,” she insists, “and it works!”). That first-hand grasp of survival in the world’s wildest places is what The Sunday Times singled out in reviewing the Chronicles, praising the “powerful understanding of loneliness, love, fear and friendship” set against a landscape that makes the writing “both credible and gripping.”

Her adult novels have opened the door to an entire new genre she calls Survivalist Gothic. Dark Matter, Thin Air and Wakenhyrst — with Rainforest forthcoming — have confirmed her position as, in the words of The Times, “the mistress of suspense.” The Guardian judged Thin Air “a heart-freezing masterpiece” and, of Dark Matter, Juno Dawson wrote that it “get[s] under my skin and infiltrate[s] my nightmares.” Yet Michelle is quick to draw a line: “I don’t write slasher horror. My stories live in the shadows of the mind: that’s my true Gothic home.”

From Malawi to Oxford, from the courtroom to the campfire, Michelle Paver’s journey has been, by her own account, full of surprises. What still makes her happiest is disarmingly simple: “If the reader keeps turning the pages all through the night. Then I feel I’ve done my job.”