Michelle Paver

Michelle Paver's second series Gods and Warriors is set during the Bronze Age. It tells the story of Hylas, a 12-year-old goatherd, whose adventures take him to Ancient Crete and Ancient Egypt, and Pirra, the daughter of a high priestess with a crescent shaped scar on her cheek. The story crucially features animals in the plot – a lion, a falcon and a dolphin; the dolphin from the first book, the lion from the second book onwards and the falcon from the 3rd book onwards.

The first of the series, Wolf Brother was published in 2004 and as a whole the books have sold over 1 million copies in the UK. Paver was paid a reported £2.8 million advance for the first book.

Her father's death in 1996 prompted her to take a one-year sabbatical, during which she travelled around France and America and wrote her first book, Without Charity. She resigned from legal practice soon after her return, to concentrate on writing. Her 2010 ghost novel Dark Matter was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award for best novel.

Michelle Paver (born 7 September 1960) is a British novelist and children's writer, known for the fantasy series Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, set in pre-agricultural Stone Age Europe. For the concluding book Ghost Hunter (2009) she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a book award judged by a panel of British children's writers.