Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Black Swan Green

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Black Swan Green

David Mitchell was born in Southport in 1969 and grew up in Malvern, England. He studied for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. He lived for a year in Sicily before moving to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England.

His first novel, Ghostwritten, was published in 1999, it tells the interlocking stories of nine narrators in nine locations across the globe. It won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.

His second novel, number9dream (2001), set in modern-day Tokyo, was shortlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize for fiction.

In 2003 Granta magazine named him one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'.

In 2004 he published Cloud Atlas about a young Pacific islander who witnesses the nightfall of science and civilization, while questions of history are explored in a series of seemingly disconnected narratives. Cloud Atlas was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Black Swan Green was published in 2006.

He lives in Ireland.

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This "beyond the book article" relates to Black Swan Green. It originally ran in April 2006 and has been updated for the February 2007 paperback edition. Go to magazine.