The march of David Mitchell continues. The author of Cloud Atlas and other acclaimed novels has won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s E.M. Forster Award, worth a princely $20,000. The prize is intended to assist a ‘young writer from the United Kingdom or Ireland for a stay in the United States.’
Every little helps, but Mitchell (43) is hardly a ‘young writer’ whose horizons are limited to the British Isles. He is international; an author who has lived in Japan and written about the country and the history of its relationship with Europeans. Mitchell is commercially successful. Cloud Atlas was a global bestseller, and it has been adapted for the screen. The film — starring Tom Hanks, Hugh Grant, Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon, Ben Wishaw and (of course) Jim Broadbent — will be released this autumn.
The E.M. Forster Award has a habit of honouring well-established writers.
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