David Mitchell (author)


David Stephen Mitchell is an English novelist, screenwriter, and translator.
He has written nine novels, two of which, number9dream and Cloud Atlas, 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.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2013.
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Early life

Mitchell was born in Southport in Lancashire, 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.

Career

Prose

Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten, 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 and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His two subsequent novels, number9dream and Cloud Atlas, were both favourably received and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. In 2007, Mitchell was listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World.
In 2012, his metafictional novel Cloud Atlas, 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.
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. He created the opera, Sunken Garden, with Dutch composer Michel van der Aa; it was premiered in 2013 by the English National Opera.
Several of Mitchell's book covers were created by design duo Kai and Sunny. 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. 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". The Bone Clocks was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and won the World Fantasy Award.
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.
Utopia Avenue, Mitchell's ninth novel, was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. 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".
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'.

Screenwriting

Following the release of the 2012 film adaptation of Cloud Atlas, Mitchell began work as a screenwriter with Lana Wachowski.
In 2015, Mitchell contributed plotting and scripted scenes for the second season of the Netflix series Sense8 by the Wachowskis, writing the series finale together with Aleksandar Hemon. Mitchell had signed a contract to write season three of the series, but Netflix cancelled the show.
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.

Personal life

After another stint in Japan, Mitchell and his wife, Keiko Yoshida, live in Ardfield, County Cork, Ireland, as of 2018. They have two children. In an essay for Random House, Mitchell wrote:
Mitchell has a stammer. He believes that the film The King's Speech is one of the most accurate portrayals of that experience for an individual. 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." Mitchell is a patron of the British Stammering Association.
Mitchell's and Yoshida's son is severely autistic. Mitchell says that to be the parent of a child with autism, "you have to become a stronger, kinder, more compassionate, more patient, tougher, clear-sighted person", and it is accompanied by a gift, "real enlightenment about the human condition and the human heart". In 2013, they 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. Mitchell called the book "a revelatory godsend", providing both practical advice and leading him to think of their son having greater agency than he had previously thought, which helped their son. Initially, his wife translated parts of the book out loud for him at the kitchen table, and then they translated the book informally to give to their son's teachers and care-givers; however, Mitchell's agent and editor thought it might have a wider audience, leading to a formal translation.
In 2017, Mitchell and his wife translated a second book by Higashida, Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man's Voice from the Silence of Autism.

Works

Novels
Novellas
Short stories
TitlePublicationNotes
"Mongolia"New Writing 8 Incorporated into Ghostwritten
"The January Man"Granta 81 Incorporated into Black Swan Green
"What You Do Not Know You Want"McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, ed. Michael Chabon -
"Acknowledgments"Prospect
"Hangman"New Writing 13 Incorporated into Black Swan Green
"Preface"The Daily Telegraph -
"Dénouement"The Guardian
"Judith Castle"The Book of Other People, ed. Zadie Smith -
"The Massive Rat"The Guardian
"An Inside Job"Fighting Words, ed. Roddy Doyle -
"Character Development"Freedom: Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -
"Muggins Here"The Guardian
"Earth Calling Taylor"Financial Times
"The Siphoners"I'm With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet -
"The Gardener"Kai & Sunny exhibition The Flower Show -
"In the Bike Sheds"We Love This Book -
"Lots of Bits of Star"Kai & Sunny exhibition Caught by the Nest -
"Variations on a Theme by Mister Donut"Granta 127 -
"The Right Sort"Twitter Incorporated into Slade House
"My Eye on You"Kai & Sunny exhibition Whirlwind of Time -
"All Souls Day"Jealous Saboteurs, Francis Upritchard Incorporated into Black Swan Green
"A Forgettable Story"Silkroad, Cathay Fiction Anthology -
"Repeats"Freeman's 5 -
"If Wishes Was Horses"The New York Times Magazine
"By Misadventure"The European Review of Books -
"U-Turn If You Want To"The Spectator

Opera librettos
Selected articles
  • "Japan and my writing", Essay
  • "Enter the Maze", The Guardian, 2004
  • "Kill me or the cat gets it", The Guardian, 2005
  • "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
Other