David Mitchell (author)
David Mitchell ( born January 12, 1969 in Southport, Merseyside ) is a British writer.
Life
David Mitchell grew up in Malvern ( Worcestershire ) as a child of two artistic working parents. Early on, he read a lot and was able to inspire especially for adventure stories. At 18, Mitchell undertook with a friend on a journey through India and Nepal. He then studied at the University of Kent at Canterbury English and American Literature and graduated with a MA in Comparative Literature. Then Mitchell spent a formative year as an English teacher in Sicily and moved to Japan, where he spent six years continued his teaching at the University of Hiroshima. Currently, Mitchell lives in Ireland Clonakilty, County Cork with his wife Keiko, with whom he has two children.
David Mitchell suffers from his childhood under stuttering, which he in which a thirteen- year-old boy has to deal together with the growing up with his speech disorder in his semi- biographical book " The thirteenth month " processed. Mitchell is a patron of the British Stammering Association and was very complimentary about "The King's Speech" of 2010, which ever full and unprejudiced grapples the first film with the theme and shows what an influence stuttering on the lives of any person concerned can have.
Work
Mitchell published his first novel " Ghostwritten " 1999 (2004 in German under the title "Chaos " was released ). His first work was well received and awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. The writer is considered by experts as the young and gifted storyteller in the British literary scene. His books are usually from the search for truth, adaptation and identity of the person concerned within a foreign culture and reincarnation.
During his studies, Mitchell wrote some bedtime stories, in which he tried repeatedly to different writing styles. Characteristic was for him eventually splitting a story into multiple fragments, which allow different views of a consistent theme. Easily recognizable, this is including in his most famous work " Cloud Atlas ", the six storylines, all of which have its own literary form contains, and allows so many different views on the unchanging basic themes. The novel contains a diary of a lawyer from the 19th century, a correspondence of a composer with a very close friend and lover from 1931, a detective novel from the 1970s, the story of an older publisher, an interrogation protocol with a clone, and a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the survivors have a simplified language and have lost all the advantages of technically highly developed civilization. Following the example of a Matryoshka, the reader is told chronologically every story up to half. The last story, Sloosha 's Crossin 'an' Ev'rythin ' anus, represents the middle part of the book and from then on, follow the remaining halves of the other stories in reverse order. Here, a narrative relies on the previous and processes it; so, for example, writes of the young composer in a letter from the Fund of the first half of the diary.
The fragmentary style is also evident in the chaos book with the subtitle " a novel in nine parts ": Nine people tell their histories, which have nothing in common at first glance. However, each character interacts (sometimes unconsciously) with one of the other eight figures. This gives a whole narrative that the reader further reveals itself with each figure. Like the two novels "number 9 dream" and " The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet " plays " chaos " in Japan and deals with the fascination with the history and society in this country.
"Cloud Atlas " was the inspiration for the eponymous film by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings from the year of 2012. Regarding the changes and rearrangements of individual sections of its history Mitchell writes in the Wall Street Journal that each medium and in its own way way had to be staged, and adjustments of a template was inevitable.
A history with 365 chapters and numerous characters and subplots that Mitchell wrote during his teaching career in Sicily and in Hiroshima, was never published.
So far Mitchell's works always by Volker Oldenburg from English were translated into German.
Publications
- Ghostwritten. A Novel in Nine Parts. Hodder & Stoughton, London 1999, ISBN 0-340-73974-6. German edition: Chaos. Translated by Volker Oldenburg. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2004, ISBN 3-498-04477- X.
- Number9dream. Hodder & Stoughton, London 2001, ISBN 0-340-73976-2. German edition: Number 9 dream. Translated by Volker Oldenburg. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2011, ISBN 978-3-498-04513-5.
- Cloud Atlas. Hodder & Stoughton, London 2004, ISBN 0-340-82278-3. German Edition: Cloud Atlas. Translated by Volker Oldenburg. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2006, ISBN 3-498-04499-0.
- Black Swan Green. Hodder & Stoughton, London 2006, ISBN 0-340-82279-1. German edition: The thirteenth month. Translated by Volker Oldenburg. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2007, ISBN 978-3-498-04504-3.
- The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Hodder & Stoughton, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-340-92156-2. German edition: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Translated by Volker Oldenburg. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2012, ISBN 978-3-498-04518-0.
Other works
- 2010: libretto for the opera Wake of Klaas de Vries.