Michelle Paver was born in 1960 in Nyasaland, now Malawi, and moved to the UK when she was three. After an education at Wimbledon High School she went on to read biochemistry at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, attaining a first class degree. Her career took her into Law and she became a partner in a City of London law firm until the death of her father, when she took a sabbatical in order to travel and wrote her first novel, Without Charity, during this time. Shortly afterwards she resigned her partnership in the law firm.