David Stephen Mitchell is an English novelist, television writer, and screenwriter. He has written nine novels, two of which, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also contributed articles for several newspapers, most notably for The Guardian, and translated books about autism from Japanese to English.

Born in Southport, Merseyside, England, Mitchell was raised in Malvern, Worcestershire. He studied at the University of Kent, earning a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature. He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years before returning to England. After another stint in Japan, he currently resides in Cork, Ireland, with his Japanese wife Keiko and their two children.

Mitchell's debut novel, Ghostwritten (1999), spans various global locations, from Okinawa to Mongolia to New York, using nine narrators whose stories interconnect. It won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.

His subsequent works, number9dream and Cloud Atlas, were both nominated for the Man Booker Prize. In 2006, he published Black Swan Green, which tells the story of a 13-year-old boy, Jason Taylor, in a small English town during the Thatcher era and the Falklands War. The novel has been compared to classics such as The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies.

In 2016, Mitchell participated in the Future Library project with the novella From Me Flows What You Call Time, which will not be read until 2114. His editor for Random House in the U.S. is the novelist David Ebershoff.