The contemporary British novelist David Mitchell was born in 1969, in Lancashire. He attended the University of Kent, where he completed a degree in English and American literature, and then a masters. It was just after graduating that he became the fiction buyer at the newly opened Waterstones, then located in St Margaret’s Street, above remnants of Roman baths there. Speaking to the Guardian some years later, he referred to the importance of this period in his life:
` “To talk about Waterstone’s in Canterbury is really to talk about Martin [Latham, the highly regarded manager who is still at the store, though in its new site in Whitefriars precinct]….. It was my first job after leaving university and it was very exciting… we opened a few weeks before Christmas, and my memory is of retailing pandemonium up until the new year.” Not that he was always kept so busy. Aside from being given a free hand in the fiction department, Mitchell was left to read. “There was a shift from 11.30am until 8pm, which was a wonderful time to get reading done. After 5.30pm there were still some customers in the store, but there were enough staff to afford a general feeling of winding down,” he says. “It was very good for a young adult to have some space not to do anything but read some wonderful books.” (Vicky Frost, `Canterbury Tales’, Guardian, May 26th 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/money/2007/may/26/careers.work7)
Mitchell was to go on from there to live and teach in Sicily, and then in Hiroshima, Japan, where he married. His first novel, `Ghostwritten’, came out in 1999. `Cloud Atlas’ from 2004 was subsequently made into a successful film in 2012. His works are characterised by expansive and ambitious plots covering territories from Japan to Mongolia to America and the UK. The one most closely associated with Kent is `The Bone Clocks’ (2014), where the first section is partially set in North West Kent.