The Sublime David Mitchell

British born David Mitchell is the award-winning and bestselling author of modern classics such as Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, and Ghostwritten. He is widely renowned as one of the greatest British novelists of his generation.

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The Sublime David Mitchell

Born in Southport, UK in 1969, David Mitchell grew up in Malvern, Worcestershire. As a child, Mitchell didn’t speak until age five, after which he developed a stammer. His childhood was often one of solitude, which meant he spent a lot of time alone with his head in a book. He spent his formative years reading J.R.R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Mitchell went on to complete a degree in English and American Literature followed by an MA in Comparative Literature, at the University of Kent.
He lived for a year in Italy before moving to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England.

In his first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), nine narrators in nine locations across the globe tell interlocking stories. This novel won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, number9dream (2001), was shortlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize for fiction. It is set in modern day Tokyo and tells the story of Eiji Miyake’s search for his father.

In 2003 David Mitchell was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. In his third novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), a young Pacific islander witnesses the nightfall of science and civilisation, while questions of history are explored in a series of seemingly disconnected narratives. Cloud Atlas was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Mitchell said of writing Cloud Atlas ‘The Russian-doll structure gets remarked on a lot, often with the word “ambitious”. I can’t truthfully claim I set out to be ambitious: it was much more a question of, “What’ll happen if I try this?”’

This was followed by Black Swan Green (2006). A meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new.

Recent books include The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), winner of the 2011 Commonwealth Writers Prize. The Bone Clocks (2013) and Slade House (2015).

In 2021 he published Utopia Avenue which documents the rise and fall of the eponymous 1960s psych rock band, from destiny in Soho to nemesis in Rome.

David Mitchell currently lives in Ireland, with his Japanese wife Keiko Yoshida. They have two children. Their son is autistic, 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. Later they later translated Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism. Both of these are well worth reading

Best David Mitchell Books to Read

Cloud Atlas

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific Ocean in 1850.

A disinherited composer conning his way into the home of a dying genius in interwar Belgium.
A high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California.

A vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors.

The testament of a genetically modified ‘dinery server’ on death-row.

And Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation.

The narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes along the corridor of history – echoes that change destinies in ways great and small.

In a globe-encircling narrative reaching from the nineteenth century to a post-apocalyptic future, Cloud Atlas erases the boundaries of time, genre and language to offer an enthralling vision of humanity’s will to power, and where it will lead us.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

In your hands is a place like no other: a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the eighteenth century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart.

Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two cultures converge. In a tale of integrity and corruption, passion and power, the key is control – of riches and minds, and over death itself.

Ghostwritten

An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what links him to a jazz buff in downtown Tokyo? Or to a Mongolian gangster, a woman on a holy mountain who talks to a tree, and a late night New York DJ?

Set at the fugitive edges of Asia and Europe, Ghostwritten weaves together a host of characters, their interconnected destinies determined by the inescapable forces of cause and effect.

Black Swan Green

Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy.

Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell’s subtlest and most effective achievement to date.

Utopia Avenue

Utopia Avenue are the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folksinger Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief and blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and draughty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the cusp of chart success, to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968.

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