Meet Michelle Paver, Ex-Partner Whose Solo Treks Led to Best-Selling Children's Series
Michelle Paver is still renowned for her work ethic. But now she produces on her own initiative, as the author of a critically acclaimed, best-selling series of children’s books, more than a decade after she left her job as a partner at a London law firm to try her hand at fiction.
Her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, which recently concluded with Ghost Hunter, is far removed from her former high-pressure job both thematically and geographically. To research the series, which focuses on a Stone Age boy and his wolf, she taken a series of solo treks to explore the life of her character, reports the Guardian.
Under her mantra, “what Torak does, so must I,” Paver has ridden across Lapland on horseback, hunted seals in Greenland and taken a dip with with killer whales in Norwegian waters, the newspaper reports.
Although she is obviously doing fine financially, after obtaining a reported contract of nearly $3 million for her Chronicles series in 2003, Paver took only a week or so off after completing the series and is now publishing another book, for adults, Dark Matter.
“I just like to write,” she tells the newspaper, and, as she got into the new book, which is a ghost story set in the Arctic, “as it got darker and darker as I was writing it, I thought this may not be for 10-year-olds.”
