Dimsum: Asia's Literary Journal

by David Mitchell, Pico Iyer, Nury Vittachi (editor)

ASIA'S PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE: Stories set in Asia take a curiously big share of top literary prizes. Why? Asia haunts the European imagination, claims David Mitchell, a regular short-listee for the Man Booker Prize. Also in this issue: essays from Paul Vincent and Paul French; new writing from Roseanne Thong, Wes Stevens, Pico Iyer, Joshua Samuel Brown, Peter Wollman, Aditi Malik, Laura Ros, Orman Day; and poetry from Ha Kiet Chau, Alfred A. Yuson, Gilbert Koh, Kate Rodgers, Dipka Mukerjee, Jennifer Wong. DIMSUM, a thrice-yearly publication of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, celebrates new writing with an Asian flavour.

108 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 2005

About the author

David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent, studying for 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 lives in Ireland with his wife Keiko and their two children. 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 6 years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself." 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. Mitchell's American editor at Random House is novelist David Ebershoff.