David Mitchell

British · born 1969

Born on January 12, 1969, in Southport, Lancashire, David Stephen Mitchell was raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, the son of two graphic artists, and was educated at Hanley Castle High School and the University of Kent, where he took a degree in English and American literature and a master's in comparative literature. He spent a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where for eight years he taught English to engineering students at a technical college and met his future wife, Keiko Yoshida. He has described his stammer, which the film The King's Speech rendered with unusual accuracy, as the silence he first wrote his way out of. His first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), nine narrators ranging from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-millennial New York, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004) were each shortlisted for the Booker, and Cloud Atlas, six nested narratives that travel from the South Pacific in 1850 to a far-future Hawaii and back, has come to stand for a particular kind of high architectural ambition in twenty-first-century fiction. Black Swan Green (2006) is the semi-autobiographical novel of a stammering thirteen-year-old; The Bone Clocks (2014) won the World Fantasy Award. With Yoshida, Mitchell translated Naoki Higashida's The Reason I Jump (2013) from Japanese, a book by a young autistic boy whose words helped them understand their own severely autistic son. He has written opera libretti, scripted The Matrix Resurrections, and contributed a manuscript called From Me Flows What You Call Time to Norway's Future Library, to be unsealed in 2114. He lives with his family in Ardfield, County Cork, Ireland.