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Michelle Paver was born in central Africa to a Belgian mother and a South African father, and came to England when she was small. She now lives in Wimbledon, London.

‘As a child’ she says ‘I was passionate about animals, myths, and how people actually survived in the distant past. I longed for a bow and arrow and I desperately wanted my own wolf. I dug up the lawn to grow medicinal herbs and slept on the floor for three years.’

After getting side-tracked into genetics and then law, Michelle gave up her career to write full-time. Her acclaimed historical novels for adults have sold in nine countries. In 2003, while taking a break between novels, Michelle picked up a story about a boy and a wolf cub that she’d tried to write 20 years before and Chronicles of Ancient Darknees was born.

‘Chronicles’ says Michelle ‘is my way of achieving what I dreamed of as a child: to run with the wild wolves in the prehistoric forest. This is a real world of flint knives and spruce bough shelters. To capture it I’ve studied Mesolithic archaeology, wolf lore and herbalism. I’ve invented customs, creation myths and death-rites for the clans of Torak’s world, borrowing from the anthropology of many cultures.

I’ve travelled in the Carpathian Mountains, Norway, Finland and Lapland and Greeland, where I studied traditional Inuit ways of life. How does it feel to sleep on reindeer skins in an open-fronted shelter? What does elk heart taste like? How do you persuade a very large, suspicious bear that you’re neither threat nor prey? I’ve found out. That hasn’t always been too comfortable – but then, if I don’t live and breathe the story, how will the reader.