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David Mitchell
David Mitchell at Skylight Books (Los Angeles, CA), 27 April 2006
Born	12 January 1969 (1969-01-12) (age 41) Southport, UK
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University of Kent
Period	1999-present
Notable work(s)	Ghostwritten, number9dream, Cloud Atlas
Notable award(s)	John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1999 Ghostwritten
Influences John Banville, Muriel Spark, Haruki Murakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, Paul Auster, Don Delillo, Russell Hoban, Italo Calvino, Peter Carey, George Orwell, Vladimir Nabokov, postmodernism, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Wright, Mikhail Bulgakov

David Mitchell (born 12 January 1969) is an English novelist. He has written four novels, two of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The latest, Black Swan Green, was longlisted for the 2006 award.

Biography

David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature.

He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England. After another stint in Japan, he currently lives in Ireland with his wife Keiko and their two children.

In an essay for Random House, Mitchell wrote:^[1]

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 6 years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself.

Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), moves around the globe, from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-Millennial New York City, as nine narrators tell stories that interlock and intersect. The novel 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.

His two subsequent novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both 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.^[2]

Mitchell's American editor at Random House is novelist David Ebershoff. He lists John Banville, Muriel Spark, Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Russell Hoban, Italo Calvino, Peter Carey, George Orwell, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Wright, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Ursula K. Le Guin among his many literary influences.

Novels

• Ghostwritten, 1999
• number9dream, 2001
• Cloud Atlas, 2004
• Black Swan Green, 2006
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, 2010

Further reading

• Mitchell, D. (2003). "January Man". Best of Young British Novelists 2003 (Granta). http://www.granta.com/Magazine/81. Retrieved 2007-09-24. 
• Linklater, A. (2007-09-22). "The author who was forced to learn wordplay". Life & Style (The Guardian). http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/wellbeing/story/0,,2173583,00.html. Retrieved 2007-09-23. 
• Mitchell, D. (2009): The Massive Rat [1] (Short Story published in "The Guardian" 01/08/2009)
• Mitchell, D. (2009): Character Development [2] (Short Story published in "The Guardian" 02/09/2009, taken from Amnesty International's anthology "Freedom")

References

1. ^ Bold Type: Essay by David Mitchell
2. ^ David Mitchell - The TIME 100 - TIME

External links

• [3] Interview with Ramona Koval on The Book Show, ABC Radio National, recorded at Wellington New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week, March 2008

• Profile: Official Man Booker Prize
• Profile: The Guardian
• Profile: www.contemporarywriters.com
• Profile: The Times
• [4]: Playing With Structure - BBC Get Writing
• Interview: Beatrice
• Interview: Bookreporter (2000)
• Interview: Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (2002)
• Interview: BBC Nottingham(2004)
• Interview: The Washington Post(2004)
• Interview: The Telegraph (2004)
• Interview: The Guardian (2004)
• Interview: Radio National (2005)
• Interview: Three Monkeys Online (2005)
• Interview: PopMatters (2006)
• Interview: Santa Cruz Sentinel (2006)
• Interview: Scotsman.com (2006)
• Interview on Bookworm, July 20, 2006
• Interview: Stop Smiling Magazine (2007)
• Audio Podcast (podcast interview on BBC4's Bookclub -- 2007)
• Short story - Character Development: The Guardian (2009)
• Extracts from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet Wbq Online March 2010

From Wikiquote

David Mitchell (born 1969-01-12) is an award-winning British writer of postmodernist novels. He has lived for many years in Japan, and has set much of his fiction in the Far East.

Sourced

• Ghostwritten’s secret agenda is to offer up eight different answers to the question, "Why do things happen?" so it has the right to monkey about with time and history. number9dreams’s secret agenda is to offer eight different answers to the question, "In what space does the mind operate?"
  • Interview in Stop Smiling magazine, June 29, 2007 [1]

• What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell.
  • Interview in Stop Smiling magazine, June 29, 2007 [2]

• What is this thing, "imagination?" A muscle that can be "forced" or "stretched"? Or something immune to the ethos of ganbaru [grit it out, or strive for one's best]? Like the relativist's view of light, it is both wave and particle, depending on what you want it to be. The verb "to imagine" is both active and passive, as in "Steve imagined his future," and "Such a future was never imagined." So, I work on my novel by imagining the world of 18th-century Nagasaki and its people and their fears and desires, as an act of will, and a lot of will is involved, believe me. However, I could ganbaru until I'm blue in the face. If my imagination doesn't work "passively" or even "intransitively," at its own behest rather than mine, and come up with cliche-demolishing twists of phrase and turns of plot and happy accidents and unexpected reactions from characters, then the book will be sterile. Well-written with luck, and even intelligent, but sterile. (...) Imagination is what makes art fertile.
  • Interview in The Japan Times Online, June 24, 2007[3]

Ghostwritten (1999)

• I have always preferred maps to books. They don't answer you back.
  • "Okinawa"

• The most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken.
  • "Clear Island"

• Lunatics are writers whose works write them.
  • "Night Train"

number9dream (2001)

• Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.
  • Part 5

• The body is the outermost layer of the mind.
  • Part 6

• Courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute.
  • Part 6

Cloud Atlas (2004)

Page-numbers refer to the 2004 Sceptre edition.

• Under the Enrichment Laws, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime.
  • "An Orison of Somni~451", p. 237.

• Yay, Old’uns’ Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an' made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more.
  • "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After", p. 286.

• Human hunger birthed the Civlize, but human hunger killed it too.
  • "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After", p. 286.

• Another war is always coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks war? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will… The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be.
  • "Letters from Zedelghem", p. 462.

• Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway,I find myself stepping out on the street again.
  • "Letters from Zedelghem", p. 75

• Diplomacy… mops up war’s spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.
  • "Letters from Zedelghem", p. 462.

• Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.
  • "Letters from Zedelghem", p. 462.

• History admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief.
  • "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing", p. 528.

• One fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself… In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
  • "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing", p. 528.

• If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.
  • "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing", p. 528.

• I hear my father-in-law's response..."Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!" Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?
  • "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing", pp. 528-9.

• Books don't offer real escape but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.
  • "Letters from Zedelghem"

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

David Mitchell (author)