Go west… middle aged man

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.