...And The Shadows Grow Longer!

Before you can write from a wolf’s point of view, you first have to become one...

Torak’s world is the world of 6,000 years ago - after the Ice Age - this is what it was like

How to hypnotize people by rubbing stones together

Warming, filling, and totally delicious!

As I floated there, I had a sudden insight into what it’s actually like to be a whale or a seal

The Inuit name for the polar bear is Nanuq: the most feared and respected of all Arctic creatures. And no wonder

From the Shetland Isles to northern Mexico, this is where Michelle goes to find inspiration

What sort of research about the world’s wildest places could you possibly do in the middle of the world’s biggest cities? A lot

The greatest books (and one that isn’t) about nature

Exciting, mind-blowing and essential reading for all humans

The Forest is central to Torak’s world, yet to bring readers Torak’s story, masses of trees have to be cut down. This is the solution

Getting hot, dusty, soaking wet, and bitten. What's not to like?

Michelle was born in Nyasaland (now Malawi), where her South African father ran the tiny Nyasaland Times, and her Belgian mother wrote a weekly gossip column. But the days of genteel colonial society were numbered, and in 1963 the family moved to England, where she was educated in Wimbledon and at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

What made Michelle start writing? What other jobs has she done? Why can't she whistle? You can find answers to these and many more things you never knew about Michelle in this, the most comprehensive collection of interview questions and answers about her ever assembled!

Michelle Paver is sparkier and less diffident than I recall. We originally met in 2004, when Wolf Brother, the first of her bestselling series of children's novels about stone-age life, appeared. Outcast, number four of a planned six, is published this week, and Paver is becoming used to the trappings of celebrity - interviews, book signings, author tours. She is at home now in the media age as well as the stone age.

"Without Charity" was Michelle's first published book.  There is a special place in every author's heart for their debut work... it is often intensely personal in flavour, and usually the result of years of hard toil.  We asked Michelle how "Without Charity" came to be - and what it means for her.

"I’m far more interested in simply telling a story than in making statements..."

A chance meeting on a railway journey unleashed a chain of events that changed Michelle's life... and set her firmly on the right track...

Michelle has won Britain’s most prestigious writing prize for children’s fiction, The Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize

The one question every reader of Chronicles of Ancient Darkness wants answered is this -  where are the stories set?  Are they in a REAL PLACE that actually exists? And if so, where IS it?