Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 19 May
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Location
The Edge, Fed Square
The Atrium Flinders Street Federation Square Melbourne Victoria 3000
Get directions
David Mitchell is best known as the author of the passionately adored literary bestseller Cloud Atlas, a subversive and seductive novel with a messiah-like following (and sales of nearly a million copies worldwide). ‘David Mitchell is a superb storyteller,’ says James Woods in the New Yorker. ‘He can get a narrative rolling along faster than most writers, so that it is filled with its own mobile life. You feel that he can do anything he wants, in a variety of modes, and still convince.’ His fans include the Wachowskis (who made Cloud Atlas into an Oscar-nominated film), Hilary Mantel and Kazuo Ishiguro, who says, ‘reading David for the first time, I was exhilarated’.
His latest novel, The Bone Clocks, has been hailed as his best book since that masterpiece … and it’s equally bizarre, beautiful and challenging.
Fifteen-year-old Holly runs away after a fight with her mother and boyfriend (so far, so normal) and is quickly absorbed by a dangerous cabal of mystics and their enemies, due to her attraction of psychic phenomena. The unsolved mystery of her ‘lost weekend’ will echo through every decade of her life, affecting everyone she loves. This kaleidoscopic novel travels from the Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a Shanghai hotel to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future.
Be taken on a journey by this wildly imaginative novelist, whose historical sweep, mastery of his craft and sheer inventiveness have made him one of the most lauded and loved novelists of our age. In conversation with Suzanne Donisthorpe.
Featuring
David Mitchell
David Mitchell is a widely-acclaimed novelist. His novels, which include Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, have won many awards and established his reputation as a master prose stylist. His latest book is The Bone Clocks.
David was born in 1969 and grew up in West Country in the UK. His first novel, Ghostwritten, was published in 1999. It was awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best book by an author under 35 and was shortlisted for The Guardian First Book Award.
His second novel, number9dream, followed in 2001 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British novelists. Cloud Atlas, published in 2004, won the British Book Awards Best Literary Fiction, the South Bank Show Literature Prize, the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year and was shortlisted for six awards including the Man Booker Prize. In 2006, Black Swan Green was long listed for the Man Booker Prize. In 2010, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book category for South Asia and Europe regions.
After living in Japan for several years, David Mitchell now lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.
Suzanne Donisthorpe
Suzanne Donisthorpe worked for 23 years on every incarnation of the books and arts programs on ABC Radio National until the beginning of 2015. She is a published author. Her novel getting Up – about a teenage graffiti artist, set in Melbourne in 1989 – was published by Momentum under the nom de plume SD Thorpe. She works as an artist collaborator with her partner, sculptor Frank Veldze.