Naoki Higashida

Utopia Avenue, Mitchell's ninth novel, will be published by Hodder & Stoughton on 14 July 2020.

In August 2019, it was announced that Mitchell would continue his collaboration with Lana Wachowski and Hemon on the fourth film in The Matrix series, writing the screenplay with them.

Mitchell was the second author to contribute to the Future Library project and delivered his book From Me Flows What You Call Time on 28 May 2016.

In 2015, Mitchell contributed plotting and scripted scenes for the second season of the Netflix show Sense8 by the Wachowskis, who had adapted his novel Cloud Atlas into film. Mitchell had signed a contract to write season three before Netflix cancelled the show. He wrote the series finale special with Lana Wachowski and Aleksandar Hemon.

Mitchell's sixth novel, The Bone Clocks, was published on 2 September 2014. In an interview in The Spectator, Mitchell said that the novel has "dollops of the fantastic in it", and is about "stuff between life and death". The Bone Clocks was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

Mitchell's son has autism. In 2013 he and his wife Keiko Yoshida translated a book which they claimed was written by Naoki Higashida, a 13-year-old Japanese boy with autism, titled The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism. In 2017, Mitchell and his wife translated the follow-up book which they also claimed was written by Higashida, Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man's Voice from the Silence of Autism. Researchers are doubtful that he wrote the book himself, with psychologist Jens Hellman claiming that Higashida's accounts "resemble what I would deem very close to an autistic child’s parents' dream".

In 2012 his novel Cloud Atlas was made into a film. One segment of number9dream was made into a BAFTA-nominated short film in 2013 starring Martin Freeman, titled The Voorman Problem. In recent years he has also written opera libretti. Wake, based on the 2000 Enschede fireworks disaster and with music by Klaas de Vries, was performed by the Dutch Nationale Reisopera in 2010. He has also finished another opera, Sunken Garden, with the Dutch composer Michel van der Aa, which premiered in 2013 by the English National Opera.

Several of Mitchell's book covers were created by design duo Kai and Sunny. Mitchell has also collaborated with the duo, by contributing two short stories to their art exhibits in 2011 and 2014.

Mitchell has the speech disorder of stammering and considers the film The King's Speech (2010) to be one of the most accurate portrayals of what it's like to be a stammerer: "I'd probably still be avoiding the subject today had I not outed myself by writing a semi-autobiographical novel, Black Swan Green, narrated by a stammering 13-year-old." Mitchell is also a patron of the British Stammering Association.

He has published seven novels, two of which, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2012, Cloud Atlas was made into a film and in 2013 a short film, The Voorman Problem, was made from a scene of number9dream.

Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), moves around the globe, from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-Millennial New York City, as nine narrators tell stories that interlock and intersect. The novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His two subsequent novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. In 2007, Mitchell was listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World.

After another stint in Japan, Mitchell currently lives with his wife, Keiko Yoshida, and their two children in Ardfield, Clonakilty in County Cork, Ireland. In an essay for Random House, Mitchell wrote: "I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I'd spent the last six years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself."

Mitchell has translated the novels The Reason I Jump and Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8 from Japanese to English, which are credited to Naoki Higashida (東田 直樹 , Higashida Naoki, born 12 August 1992) , a severely autistic Japanese individual. Researchers have doubted that Mitchell should give Higashida credit with writing the original Japanese versions, as those works were done through facilitated communication, which is scientifically debunked. Writing for In-Mind, psychologist Jens Hellman is also skeptical that Higashida should get credit, claiming that Higashida's accounts "resemble what I would deem very close to an autistic child’s parents' dream". Higashida can speak but can only repeat certain phrases. Some sources have mistakenly claimed that he is mute.

David Stephen Mitchell (born 12 January 1969) is an English novelist and screenwriter.