Private Passions

David Mitchell is the author of nine time-traversing, genre-bending novels. His first, Ghostwritten, was published 25 years ago, and his third, Cloud Atlas, made his name around the world, and later became a Hollywood film. It follows six interlocking lives in an ambitious narrative that circles the globe and travels through time from 19th-century New Zealand to a post-apocalyptic future in Hawaii – and back again.

Closer to home, he drew on his own childhood in Worcestershire in his coming-of-age tale Black Swan Green, about a teenager attempting to overcome a stammer and negotiate playground hierarchies, all against the backdrop of the Falklands War.

His most recent novel, Utopia Avenue, charts the rise of an imaginary rock band in the late 1960s.

David's musical choices include Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius and Hildegard von Bingen.