David Mitchell

Biography

David Mitchell (born 1969) is a British novelist who lived in Japan for eight years, an experience that shaped his interest in cross-cultural transmission and the way stories travel across languages and societies. Cloud Atlas was his third novel, written after Ghostwritten (1999) and number9dream (2001), both of which used multiple narrative voices and experimented with connectivity between stories. Mitchell has described Cloud Atlas as his attempt to write a novel about whether human nature — specifically, the tendency toward predation — is immutable, and whether small individual acts can alter large-scale systems. He has been open about the influence of Italo Calvino and the Oulipo movement on his structural choices.

David Mitchell at a glance