David Mitchell

David Mitchell was born in Southport, England, and grew up in a village in Worcestershire. He developed a stammer at a young age and remains a member of the British Stammering Association. Mitchell attended the University of Kent, then spent eight years in Hiroshima, Japan, where he met his wife and taught English as a second language to technical students. He published his first novel, Ghostwritten, in 1999. The book received widespread acclaim, as did his next two novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004). In 2006, Mitchell published Black Swan Green, a novel that he describes as “semi-autobiographical,” due to the stammering narrator and being set in a fictional village in the same part of England where Mitchell grew up. Mitchell has published a total of nine novels as of 2025, along with several stories and essays. He has also written for film and television, including Sense8 and The Matrix Resurrections. Mitchell currently lives in County Cork, Ireland, with his wife and two children.