Michelle Paver is an author who until recently was best known to younger readers.

Last year she won the prestigious Guardian Prize for Children’s Fiction for her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series but 2010 also saw her make a triumphant return to adult fiction with Dark Matter, a ghost story set in the Arctic.

Paver, who will discuss the book and the tradition of supernatural literary thrillers, at the Kingston Readers' Festival next week, says that she was not perturbed by the prospect of writing for adults again.

“I’m never terribly conscious of the audience I’m writing for,” she says.

“I just focus on the voice and the language I need to use for a particular story. “What I was more concerned with was whether Dark Matter would be frightening enough and that can be really hard to tell.”

Paver had long been of the mind to write a ghost story and it was a trip to Spitsbergen in Norway that gave her the impetus to write Dark Matter.

“I first had the idea to write a ghost story about eight years ago,” she says.

“When I went to Spitsbergen I immediately felt that I should set a story there but it took a while for the penny didn’t drop until that it should be my ghost story.

“The special thing about the Arctic, that it is light all summer and dark all winter, had been staring me in the face.”

The book, set in 1937, takes the form of a journal, written by working class lad Jack Miller, who is invited to join a group of upper-class Oxford students on a weather-monitoring expedition to an Arctic outpost near Spitsbergen.

The plan is for the group to ‘overwinter’ there, but as the days get shorter events conspire to leave Jack all alone. With no relief from the dark, he begins to fear that someone, or something, is haunting him. Part of Dark Matter’s power is that its ghoulish thrills are couched in the reality of Jack’s subsequent psychological breakdown.

“I’ve been to the Arctic many times and it is easy to start seeing things that shouldn’t be and I like the possibilities that offered,” says Paver.

“I always intended that the ghost is real but the fact that the loneliness and the darkness do things to Jacks add a richness to the story and I hope it makes the reader wonder if he is losing his mind.”

Michelle Paver, Tiffin Boys’ School, Kingston, May 6, 7.30pm, £8/£5, kingston.ac.uk/krf