David Mitchell

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
David Mitchell (2006)

David Mitchell (born January 12, 1969 in Southport , Merseyside ) is a British writer .

Life

David Mitchell grew up in Malvern (Worcestershire) as the child of two artistic parents. He read a lot at an early age and was particularly enthusiastic about adventure stories. At the age of 18, Mitchell took a friend on a trip through India and Nepal. He then studied English and American literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury and earned an MA in comparative literature . Mitchell then spent a year teaching English in Sicily and moved to Japan, where he continued teaching at Hiroshima University for six years. Mitchell currently lives in Clonakilty , County Cork, Ireland with his wife Keiko, with whom he has two children.

Mitchell has suffered from stuttering since childhood , which he processed in his semi-biographical book “ The Thirteenth Month ”, in which a thirteen-year-old boy has to deal with his speech disorder as he grows up . Mitchell is a patron of the British Stammering Association and commented very positively on " The King's Speech " from 2010, which is the first film ever to deal fully and without prejudice with the subject and shows what impact stuttering has on the life of a person concerned may have.

plant

Mitchell published his first novel "Ghostwritten" in 1999 (published in German in 2004 under the title "Chaos"). His first work was well received and was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize . The writer is regarded by experts as a young and talented storyteller in the British literary scene. His books are mostly about the search for truth , adaptation and identity finding within a culture and reincarnation that is foreign to the person concerned .

During his student days, Mitchell wrote a few bedtime stories in which he repeatedly tried his hand at different writing styles. What finally became characteristic of him was the division of a narrative into several fragments, which enable different perspectives on a constant topic. This is clearly recognizable in his best-known work “ The Cloud Atlas ”, which contains six storylines, each with their own literary form, and thus enables very different views on the basic themes that remain the same. The novel contains a 19th-century attorney's diary , a composer's correspondence with a very close friend and lover from 1931, a 1970s detective novel , the story of an older publisher, the interrogation record with a clone, and a post-apocalyptic Scenario in which the survivors have a simplified language and have lost all advantages of the technically advanced civilization. Following the example of a matryoshka , the reader is told up to half of each story chronologically. The last story, Sloosha's Crossin 'to' Ev'rythin 'After , is the middle section of the book, and from then on the remaining halves of the other stories follow in reverse order. A narrative thread takes up the previous one and processes it further; For example, the young composer wrote a letter about the discovery of the first half of the diary.

The fragmentary style is also evident in “ Chaos ” with the subtitle “A novel in nine parts”: Nine people tell their respective stories that at first glance have nothing in common. However, each figure interacts (partly unconsciously) with one of the other eight figures. The result is a whole narrative that the reader continues to understand with each figure. Like the two novels "number 9 dream" and "The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet", "Chaos" is set in Japan and deals with the fascination for the history and society of this country.

"Cloud Atlas" served as the template for the film of the same name by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings from 2012. With regard to the changes and rearrangements of the individual parts of his story, Mitchell writes in the Wall Street Journal that every medium is in its own way Must be staged wisely, which is why adjustments to a template are inevitable.

A 365-chapter story with innumerable characters and subplots that Mitchell wrote while teaching in Sicily and Hiroshima was never published.

So far, Mitchell's works have always been translated from English into German by Volker Oldenburg .

Publications

Other works

Prizes and awards

Secondary literature

  • Sarah Dillon (Ed.): David Mitchell: Critical Essays . Gylphi, Canterbury 2011. ISBN 978-1780240022
  • Patrick O'Donnell: A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell . Bloomsbury, London 2015. ISBN 978-1441171221 .
  • Substance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism. Special Issue: David Mitchell and the Labyrinth of Time . 2015. (Special issue on Mitchell; = Substance 44: 1, No. 136)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c David Mitchell , Mark Flanagan, about.com
  2. ↑ David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204 , Adam Begley interview , The Paris Review , Summer 2010, no.193
  3. ↑ a b Lost for words , David Mitchell, Prospect , February 23, 2011, item # 180, accessed August 12, 2018.
  4. ↑ Black Swan Green revisited , David Mitchell, article in Speaking Out , Spring 2011, p. 17, accessed August 12, 2018.
  5. ↑ Translating 'Cloud Atlas' Into the Language of Film , David Mitchell, The Wall Street Journal , October 19, 2012, accessed August 12, 2018.
  6. ↑ Doctor Zhivago in Nagasaki. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 4, 2012, p. 28.
  7. ↑ Wieland Freund : This is Harry Potter for high culture. In: welt.de. Die Welt , September 6, 2014, accessed September 18, 2014 .
  8. ^ Pico Iyer: Worlds within worlds. In: International New York Times , August 30, 2014, p. 19.
  9. ↑ David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks. Rowohlt Verlag , accessed December 10, 2015 .
  10. ↑ Mitchell, Slade House (hardcover) - Rowohlt. Retrieved February 1, 2018 .
  11. ^ NRC Handelsblad: Review of the opera Wake ( Memento from June 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive )


personal data
SURNAME Mitchell, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 12, 1969
PLACE OF BIRTH Southport