David Mitchell

David Mitchell is an English novelist and screenwriter born in Southport in 1969. He studied English and American literature at the University of Kent and spent several years living and teaching in Japan, an experience that strongly influenced his settings and interest in cultural exchange. Beginning with Ghostwritten in 1999, Mitchell developed a reputation for formally ambitious novels that move between narrators, countries, genres and historical periods. number9dream and Cloud Atlas were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and he now lives in Ireland with his wife, the Japanese writer and translator Keiko Yoshida, and their family.

Mitchell’s clearest conventional historical novel is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, set in 1799 at the Dutch East India Company trading post of Dejima in Nagasaki harbour. It follows a Dutch clerk, a Japanese midwife and a society tightly controlling contact with foreigners, combining trade, medicine, corruption and cultural conflict. Historical narratives also form important parts of Cloud Atlas, which begins with a nineteenth-century Pacific voyage and later moves through 1930s Belgium, while Utopia Avenue follows a fictional band through the British and American music scenes of 1967 and 1968. Mitchell should therefore be classified principally as a literary and speculative novelist who also writes historical fiction, rather than solely as a historical novelist.