– This week's guest on REPORT FROM SANTA FE is English novelist David Mitchell. Two of his novels, “number9dream” and “Cloud Atlas,” were short listed for the 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. In 2102, his novel “Cloud Atlas” was made into an award-winning film starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry and directed by the directors of the Matrix trilogy. Mitchell's recent novel “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was selected by Time as one of the Ten Best Novels of the Year. Mitchell has the speech disorder of stammering, about which he says, "I'd probably still be avoiding the subject today had I not outed myself by writing a semi-autobiographical novel, “Black Swan Green,” narrated by a stammering 13 year old." Mitchell is also a patron of the British Stammering Association.

-- QUOTES: “Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across this novel's every page.” --The New York Times Book Review, of ”Cloud Atlas” “A novel as accomplished as anything being written.” -- Newsweek, of “number9dream” “Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.” -- David Mitchell, “Cloud Atlas”