David Mitchell (author)

David Mitchell
Mitchell in 2006
Born	David Stephen Mitchell (1969-01-12) 12 January 1969 (age 55) Southport, England
Occupation	Novelist, television writer, screenwriter
Education	University of Kent
Period	1999–present
Notable works	number9dream Cloud Atlas
Notable awards	John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1999 Ghostwritten
Spouse	Keiko Yoshida
Children	2
Website
www.davidmitchellbooks.com

David Stephen Mitchell (born 12 January 1969) is an English novelist, television writer, and screenwriter.

He has written nine novels, two of which, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written articles for several newspapers, most notably for The Guardian. He has translated books about autism from Japanese to English.

Mitchell was born in Southport in Lancashire (now Merseyside), England, and raised in Malvern, Worcestershire. He was educated at Hanley Castle High School. At the University of Kent, he earned a degree in English and American Literature, followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature.

Mitchell lived in Sicily for a year. He moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England. There he could live on his earnings as a writer and support his pregnant wife.^[1]

Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), takes place in locations ranging from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-millennial New York City, as nine narrators tell stories that interlock and intersect. It won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.^[2] His two subsequent novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both favourably received and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.^[3]

In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.^[4] In 2007, Mitchell was listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World.^[5]

In 2012, his metafictional novel Cloud Atlas (again, with multiple narrators), was adapted as a feature film of the same name.

One segment of number9dream was adapted as a short film titled The Voorman Problem and starring Martin Freeman. It was nominated for a BAFTA in 2013.^[6]

In addition to novels, Mitchell has written opera libretti in recent years. Wake, with music by Klaas de Vries, was based on the 2000 Enschede fireworks disaster. It was performed by the Dutch Nationale Reisopera in 2010.^[7] He created the opera, Sunken Garden, with Dutch composer Michel van der Aa; it was premiered in 2013 by the English National Opera.^[8]

Several of Mitchell's book covers were created by design duo Kai and Sunny.^[9] Mitchell has also collaborated with the duo, by contributing two short stories to their art exhibits in 2011 and 2014.

Mitchell's sixth novel, The Bone Clocks, was published in 2014.^[10] In an interview in The Spectator, Mitchell said that the novel has "dollops of the fantastic in it", and is about "stuff between life and death".^[11] The Bone Clocks was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.^[12]

Mitchell was the second author to contribute to the Future Library project. He delivered his book From Me Flows What You Call Time on 28 May 2016.^[13][14]

Utopia Avenue, Mitchell's ninth novel, was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2020, during the first year of the Covid 19 pandemic.^[15] Utopia Avenue tells the "unexpurgated story" of a British band of the same name, who emerged from London's psychedelic scene in 1967 and was "fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet and blues bassist Dean Moss".^[16]

Mitchell's entire body of fictional works feature multiple recurring characters and themes that together form an interconnected fictional world, which Mitchell refers to as his 'macronovel'.^[17]

Following the release of the 2012 film adaptation of Cloud Atlas, Mitchell began work as a screenwriter with Lana Wachowski (one of Cloud Atlas' three directors). In 2015, Mitchell contributed plotting and scripted scenes for the second season of the Netflix series Sense8 by the Wachowskis. They had adapted the novel for a TV series, and together with Aleksandar Hemon, they wrote the series finale.^[18] Mitchell had signed a contract to write season three of the series, but Netflix cancelled the show.^[19]

In August 2019, it was announced that Mitchell would continue his collaboration with Lana Wachowski and Hemon to write the screenplay for The Matrix Resurrections.^[20]

After another stint in Japan, Mitchell and his wife, Keiko Yoshida, live in Ardfield, County Cork, Ireland, as of 2018^[update]. They have two children.^[21] In an essay for Random House, Mitchell wrote:^[22]

I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I'd spent the last six years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself.

Mitchell has a stammer.^[23] He believes that the film The King's Speech (2010) is one of the most accurate portrayals of that experience for an individual.^[23] He said, "I'd probably still be avoiding the subject today had I not outed myself by writing a semi-autobiographical novel, Black Swan Green, narrated by a stammering 13-year-old."^[23] Mitchell is a patron of the British Stammering Association.^[24]

Mitchell's son is autistic. In 2013, Mitchell and his wife Yoshida translated a book into English that was written by Naoki Higashida, a 13-year-old Japanese autistic boy, titled The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism.^[25] Higashida is said to have learned to communicate using the techniques of facilitated communication and rapid prompting method.^{[citation needed]}

In 2017, Mitchell and his wife translated a second book attributed to Higashida, Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man's Voice from the Silence of Autism.^[26]

Novels

• Ghostwritten (1999)
• number9dream (2001)
• Cloud Atlas (2004)
• Black Swan Green (2006)
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)
• The Bone Clocks (2014)
• Slade House (2015)
• Utopia Avenue (2020)

Novellas

• From Me Flows What You Call Time (2016; publishing delayed until 2114 as part of Library of the Future project)

Short stories

Opera librettos

• "Wake" opera in four acts (May 2010) by Klaas de Vries (composer), electronics by René Uijlenhoet for Nationale Reisopera
• "Sunken Garden"(12 April 2013), film opera for English National Opera at Barbican Theatre

Selected articles

• "Japan and my writing", Essay
• "Enter the Maze", The Guardian, 2004
• "Kill me or the cat gets it", The Guardian, 2005 (Book review of Kafka on the Shore)
• "Let me speak", British Stammering Association, 2006
• "On historical fiction", The Daily Telegraph, 2010
• "Adventures in Opera", The Guardian, 2010
• "Imaginary City", Geist, 2010
• "Lost for words", Prospect, 2011
• "Learning to live with my son's autism", The Guardian, 2013
• "David Mitchell on Earthsea – a rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin", The Guardian, 23 October 2015
• "Kate Bush and me: David Mitchell on being a lifelong fan of the pop poet". The Guardian, 7 December 2018^[27]

Other

• "The Earthgod and the Fox", 2012 (translation of a short story by Kenji Miyazawa; translation printed in McSweeney's Issue 42, 2012)
• The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism, 2013 (translation of book by Naoki Higashida)
• "Before the Dawn", 2014 (with Kate Bush co-wrote two spoken scenes during The Ninth Wave sequence in this live production).^[28]
• Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8, 2017 (translation of Naoki Higashida's work)
• "Amor Vincit Omnia", 2018; Sense8 episode^[29][30]
• The Matrix Resurrections, 2021 (feature film screenplay co-written with Lana Wachowski and Aleksandar Hemon)

• "The world begins its turn with you, or how David Mitchell's novels think". In B. Schoene. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
• Dillon, S. (ed.). David Mitchell: Critical Essays. Kent: Gylphi, 2011.
• Bentley, Nick (2018). "Trailing Postmodernism : David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Zadie Smith's NW, and the Metamodern". English Studies. 99 (7): 723–43. doi:10.1080/0013838X.2018.1510611. S2CID 165906081.

Wikiquote has quotations related to David Mitchell (author).

• Official website
• David Mitchell's profile at the official Booker Prize site
• David Mitchell at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Adam Begley (Summer 2010). "David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204". Paris Review. Summer 2010 (193).
• Linklater, A. (22 September 2007). "The author who was forced to learn wordplay". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 23 September 2007.
• David Mitchell - How I Write, Untitled Books, May 2010
• "Get Writing: Playing With Structure" by David Mitchell at BBC.co
• "Character Development" by David Mitchell, a short story from The Guardian (2009)
• "David Mitchell, the Experimentalist", New York Times Magazine, June 2010
• "The Floating Library: What can't the novelist David Mitchell do?", The New Yorker, 5 July 2010
• "The Art of Scriptwriting: David Mitchell on Matrix 4" Archived 17 November 2021 at the Wayback Machine, at the 21. international literature festival, Berlin, 10 September 2021