Michel Faber moved with his family to Australia in 1967 and emigrated to Scotland in 1993. His short story ‘Fish’ won the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition in 1996 and was included in his first collection of short stories, Some Rain Must Fall (1998), winner of the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. Other short stories won the Neil Gunn Prize and an Ian St James Award.
His first novel, Under the Skin (2000), was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award.
Other fiction includes the novellas The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (2001), and The Courage Consort (2002), about an a cappella singing group. The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), is set in Victorian England and tells the story of Sugar, a 19-year-old prostitute. In 2005 a short story collection The Fahrenheit Twins (retitled Vanilla Bright Like Eminem in the USA) was published, followed in 2006 by The Apple, short stories featuring some of the characters from The Crimson Petal and the White. The Fire Gospel (2008) retold the myth of Prometheus. 2014 saw the publication of The Book of Strange New Things, which Faber declared would be his final novel for adults. It won both the Saltire Scottish Fiction Book of the Year and the overall Saltire Book of the Year awards in 2015. In 2016 he published Undying, a book of poems about his wife’s cancer and the grief that followed her death. He is currently working on a novel for children.