Born David Stephen Mitchell in the seaside town of Southport, Merseyside, England on January 12, 1969, he was the son of visual artists who raised him in the parish of Malvern, Worcestershire. Mitchell suffered from speech issues as a young child; he did not speak until he was five years of age, and soon after developed a stammer. He found solace in books, and experimented with writing poetry in his adolescence. In his teens, Mitchell backpacked through India and Nepal with a girlfriend before returning to England for his studies at the University of Kent. While obtaining a degree in English and American Literature there, he also looked after one of his professor's children, for whom he would write bedtime stories in a variety of different literary styles. After gaining his masters' degree in comparative literature, Mitchell taught English in Sicily and then Hiroshima, Japan, where he met his wife, Keiko Yoshida. The couple would eventually have two children, one of whom was autistic. While in Japan, he began working on a complex novel, comprised of 365 chapters and 20 subplots, which went unpublished. His next effort, Ghostwritten, followed a similar if less elaborate route, with multiple locations and nine different narrators. Published in 1999, the book won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, given to British literature by authors under the age of 35, and established Mitchell as a gifted writer with the ability to interweave intricate storylines into a compelling work. His next works followed in similar patterns: his second book, number9dream (2001), juxtaposed a Japanese teenager's search for his father with the boy's rich fantasy life, while Cloud Atlas (2004), followed six interlocking stories from the 19th century to the post-apocalyptic future. Mitchell then took a semi-autobiographical route for his fourth novel, Black Swan Green (2006), about a teenaged boy with a stammer growing up in a small West Midlands village. Though the works differed from each other in terms of subject matter, they were all interconnected by characters that appeared, often in brief cameos, in each of the works: a young student in Black Swan Green was previously featured as an adult character in Ghostwritten, while supporting characters in Cloud Atlas also turn up in Black Swan Green.By the end of the 2000s, Mitchell was among Britain's most celebrated authors. Dubbed one of the country's best young novelists by Granta in 2003, he was named as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World by 2007. Three of his novels had been listed for the Man Booker Prize, among numerous other laurels, while Black Swan Green was recognized by the American Library Association and School Library Journal as among the best books of the year for young adults. In 2010, he published his fifth novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, about a 19th century Dutch trader who pursues the Japanese midwife he loves after she is kidnapped by a cult. Named one of Time's best books of the year, it would serve as his last work of narrative fiction for the next four years. Mitchell would turn his focus to writing libretti for two new operas, "Wake" (2010), based on a catastrophic real-life fireworks disaster in the Netherlands, and "Sunken Garden," which premiered in 2013. During this period, Cloud Atlas served as the basis for a 2012 film by Larry and Lana Wachowski, with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry among the leads. In 2013, Mitchell's experiences as the father of an autistic child spurred him to collaborate with his wife on the English translation for The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism, a 2007 book written by Naoki Higashida, a Japanese teenager who also struggled with the condition. That same year, he released a plot outline for his sixth book, The Bone Clocks. In an interview, he also revealed that his libretto for "Sunken Garden" was a prologue for the novel, slated for release in the fall of 2014.