Michelle Paver was born in Nyasaland (now Malawi) in central Africa. Her mother was Belgian and her South African father ran a newspaper, the Nyasaland Times. Her family settled in Wimbledon, England when she was three. She was educated at Lady Margaret Hall and Wimbledon High School. After reading biochemistry at the University of Oxford, where she attained a first-class degree, she became a partner in a City of London law firm. 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.

The first of her children's series of books, Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, 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. Ghost Hunter (2010), the sixth and last in the series, won the 2010 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.