When I was writing Spirit Walker, I needed to immerse myself in Torak’s world.  So I went there. To experience the Seal Islands, I travelled to the Lofoten islands of north-west Norway.  Like Torak, I went at Midsummer, which is a very strange time in the north, because it doesn’t get dark.  I found it…

For research, I spent time in north-east Greenland in winter, where I experienced at first hand the power of wind and snow, watched glaciers calving and icebergs crashing into each other, and took several husky sled trips Greenland-style (racing as fast as the dogs could go over hills, frozen lakes, anything in their path). To…

The Inuit name for the polar bear is Nanuq: the most feared and respected of all Arctic creatures.  And no wonder.  The polar bear is the largest land predator in the world, and an incredibly skilled hunter, equally at home on ice, mountain, or in the sea.  And unlike the grizzly or black bear, which…

In Outcast, much of the story takes place in or around Lake Axehead, so I needed a large lake.  Where better than Sweden, which has about a hundred thousand lakes to choose from? To get ideas for Lake Axehead, I went to Lake Storsjon in northern Sweden, where I got inspiration for the eerie reedbeds…

In addition to the trips which I made specifically to research the books, I have over the years made many trips which I have used in writing the books. The Shetland Isles: in 1988 I rented a remote cottage on Unst, the northernmost island in the British Isles. My notes on the seals, seabirds and…

To research OATH BREAKER, I needed inspiration for the Deep Forest, which had to feel utterly different from the Open Forest where, until now, the story had been set.  So I travelled to the last remnant of primeval lowland Forest in Europe: the Bialowieza Forest in Poland. In Bialowieza I saw the zubron (a hybrid…

What sort of research about the world’s wildest places could you possibly do in the middle of the world’s biggest cities?  In fact, you can do a lot of research without leaving town… in your library. In addition to location and wolf research, I also did lots of library research. What weapons did Torak’s people…

For GHOST HUNTER, I needed inspiration for the Mountain of Ghosts, and to refresh my memory on what the Forest is like in winter. I visited Finnish Lapland in midwinter, where, in the Urkho Kekkonen National Park, I snowshoed for miles through the silent forest, following the tracks of a female elk, and watching reindeer…