Michelle Paver
- Name: Michelle Paver
- Place of Birth: Nyasaland (now Malawi)
- Featured Title: Wolf Brother / Spirit Walker
- First Book Published: Without Charity
- Website: Click to here visit
- Favourite Animal : Wolf
- Hobbies: Watching films, travelling
- See all titles from Michelle
It's an odd thing about writing, but sometimes you can want very much to write a particular story, without really knowing why. That's how it was for me with Wolf Brother. When I began it, I knew that I wanted to write about a boy, a girl and a wolf in the Stone Age forest, but I didn't realise until much later where it all came from.
When I was ten, I wanted to live like the Stone Age people, and I wanted a wolf. I'm not entirely sure how the wolf idea took root, but the Stone Age bit is easier to trace. Like many children, I was fascinated by the idea of surviving on my own in the wild. Where would I sleep? What would I eat? As we lived in south London, trying it for myself wasn't easy, but I did what I could. I bought a rabbit from the butcher and skinned it. I padded about in weird homemade moccasins sewn from scraps of leather. I cooked nettle soup of an alarming green for my bemused family.
Obtaining a wolf proved impossible, but I was happy with my spaniel substitute; and as my imagination had been well primed by The Call of the Wild and Roger Lancelyn Green's luminous retellings of the world's myths, the dog turned into a wolf when we went for walks on Wimbledon Common.
Thirty-five years on, things have come full circle. These days, I try to live and breathe the Stone Age, because that's what I want for my readers. For Wolf Brother, this meant camping in the Finnish forest and learning about the Sami way of life. Spirit Walker involved a trip to Greenland to study Inuit survival methods and a swim with some wild killer whales; Soul Eater a nose-to-nose encounter with polar bears on the Canadian tundra.
Often it's the unexpected things - the small, startling details - which find their way into the story. The rich taste of reindeer-heart stew. The way the sea shimmers with millions of fish scales after killer whales have fed on a shoal of herring. The clean, grassy smell which you inhale when you stick your nose (politely) in a wolf's furry scruff. These are the details that can make readers feel as if they're inside the story. For me, that's the aim. Not education, or any kind of 'message'. Just that magical feeling of living the adventure alongside the characters.
Strange to think that it all goes back to a ten-year-old spattering her mother's kitchen with nettle soup. Thank goodness for parents who bring up their children in book-friendly households, and tolerate their obsessions!
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...
Michelle was educated in Wimbledon and at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. There she read Biochemistry and also made her first serious attempts at writing: two Mills & Boon-type novels, written in a matter of weeks and summarily rejected (‘with good reason!’ she says), followed by a couple of children’s fantasy novels - also rejected, although more encouragingly.
By then she was in the grip of the writing bug. She even managed to ditch the usual final-year laboratory project in favour of a written thesis: simply because, as she admits, ‘I'd stumbled on a great story: Soviet genetics driven underground by an illiterate croney of Stalin's. How could I resist?’
That got her a First, but by then she'd decided against a career in science. ‘I knew I wanted to write, but I didn't think I'd be able to make a living at it, so I looked around for a day job: something that would pay the bills while giving me time to write. Like an idiot, I chose the Law. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. One rainy afternoon I was leafing through a careers brochure when I came across an article on being a solicitor. I thought, ‘that'll give me a few years' breathing space before it gets too demanding, so why not?’’
Of course it didn't turn out quite like that. Michelle qualified as a solicitor with a big City firm, and was soon up to her neck in big-ticket scientific litigation. Multinational drug companies slugging it out over who owned which gene; tobacco companies battling to defend themselves against plaintiffs dying of cancer. ‘There were times,’ she says, ‘when I didn't exactly feel on the side of the angels.’
Outwardly she was a success, having been made a partner five years after qualification. But the strain of all-night meetings and missed weekends was beginning to tell. Then in 1996 her father died, and that proved a wake-up call. ‘I realized that I wasn't doing what I really wanted to do, and although I was earning lots of money, I'd never have time to spend it. So I decided to negotiate a year off, to get myself sorted out. At the time, that was unheard-of in a City firm. They didn't even have a sabbatical policy. But I told myself that if they said no, I'd quit anyway, and that at least gave me the courage to ask. To my astonishment, they said yes.’
Michelle spent 1997 travelling around Peru, Ecuador, South Africa, France, and the States, and finishing the first draft of WITHOUT CHARITY…
