BBC sounds, music, radio, podcasts Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were castaway to a desert island. And for right reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

My castaway this week is the author, David Mitchell, all writers like to imagine they defy categorization. He really does. From sci fi epic Cloud Atlas to the magical bone clocks via the semiautobiographical Black Swan Green. His intricately structured stories traverse time and genre with equalise. He's known for marrying literary daring with input, danceable storytelling and perhaps the most difficult creative circle to square. He's as critically lauded as he is popular equally at home on the Booker Prize and bestseller lists.

You'll be surprised to hear he's also modest growing up in suburban Worcestershire. He was, he says, a bog standard comprehensive kid, though an important part of him was elsewhere. His imagination had been captured by sci fi, fantasy and prog rock. He made it his mission to map out a realm of his own, and he's been writing ever since. He says When writing is great, your mind is nowhere else. But in this world that started off in the mind of another human being, there are two miracles at work here.

One, that someone thought of that world and the people in the first place. And the second that there's this means of transmitting it just little marks on squashed wood fiber. Amazing. David Mitchell, welcome to Desert Island Discs o line.

It's great to be here. Thank you. I've always wondered what the departure lounge to the desert island looks like, and I must admit, I really like what you've done with the place.

Well, thank you very much. Welcome. Take it easy because you're sharing your music choices with us today. I know you've spent a lot of time with music lately. Your recent novel, Utopia Avenue is about a four piece band in the late 60s. How enjoyable was that research?

Oh, enormously. In some ways it's a bit cheeky calling it research. It was really my diversion activities for the last two or three books. When I wanted a break from them, I'd go onto YouTube and see if there was a new interview with David Bowie or Brian Jones or anyone. I almost wrote Utopia Avenue so I could legitimize it all and make an honest man of myself as a researcher and call that research. And I think you learn to play the piano, too.

That's right. Well, I needed to know what my characters know about music, and I didn't. And the only way to really get inside them was to have at least a few guitar lessons and the piano as well, which I've continued with a very long suffering piano teacher, Tonya. And I'm up to basic Bach.

You're a great one for structure as well. So today we've got one story to tell and eight disc's to do it.

How did you approach the task of Noticer Castaways Choose songs for three broad reasons. One is to remind them of people that they're going to miss. Another is to remind them of particular times and places that were important to them. And the third reason is for some kind of sustenance might be spiritual or intellectual or artistic or maybe just humor. So I've chosen a kind of a Metalist. I've got different items from these three categories. And that was my modus operandi when I was choosing the songs.

So let's get started. Desk number one. David, what are we going to hear and why have you chosen this one?

We're going to have Sunset by Kate Bush. I don't really want to live on my island without a little bit of Kate Bush fan. Her music sort of blows away the fog of the humdrum, and it's got a way of revealing the beauty that's hiding there in everyday life, hiding in plain sight. I even wrote down the first lines. This will sound like a quote. It is. Who knows who wrote that song of summer, that blackbird sing at dusk.

This is a song of color where sons sing and crimson and red and must then climb into bed and turn to dust. You got Venus, Apollo and Hades. They're all in five lines and if I'd written, that'd be pretty damn pleased with myself. The song would also remind me of my daughter because we went to see the Kate Bush concert at Hammersmith where she performed this and many of the great songs a few years ago. I intend to do.

Kate Bush and Sunset. So, David Mitchell, I have to ask you then about the book now, readers who stay with you will notice how characters and their histories recur in your novels. The literature students who study your work call this matter lapses, but I think you call it having your cake and eating it.

The Uber novel allows me to do two things. It allows me to fulfill the ambition as a Tolkien geek kid who wanted to write something enormous, something as big as Middle Earth or as big as Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire or as big as Ursula Gwyn's Earthsea. As an adult, I am also interested in very, very specific locales in history, in the past, the present or the future. And I don't want to write something that huge. I want to write something that fully understands the mechanics and electrical circuitry of a much smaller, localized world.

But by also having some characters recur throughout this sort of cluster of localized worlds, I simultaneously create something as large as Middle Earth or the Galactic Empire. So that's having cake and eating it. Reason. It's also just fun to do. You get that I know you that throb of recognition. And also I note that recurring characters don't arrive in the book empty handed. They bring luggage with them if you knew them from a previous book. Now, the prime directive is that if you've never heard anything else I've written before and never read anything again, the books each do and must work independently.

I don't want them to be installments in some epic cycle. However, as it happens, if you have read by the books, then it might work a little bit like an epic cycle. So that's my having my cake and eating it as well.

I guess it sounds like characters follow you around wherever you go. I think you've described your mind as a parliament of voices you might you find on the benches there.

My nervous, introverted, bookish, stammering younger self, my reasonably comfortable in his own skin, middle aged publishers' herself, all the cells that are in between all the other selves I could have been all a parliament of ourselves are no one's self is always in charge. This is why we can so frequently appall ourselves with what we do. And I think that maybe doing that and yes, it was. But even the self that is saying was that me doing that is also a self.

So and the writer, you then what's what's their job in all of this hubbub? Writer me, maybe the writer Mazelike, the speaker, the speaker at Westminster. It's the one that has to see the bigger picture and use them all and mobilize them and heard them heard those complaining, whingeing cats with headaches. Maybe that's what the writer self does.

It's time to your second desk today. Tell us what we're going to hear and why you've chosen it.

You'd like to choose Requiem by the Icelandic composer John Leifs. This is a cool piece. He wrote it for his daughter, who sadly drowned. So in my categories of why people choose songs for Desert Island Discs, this one comes and sustenance. I experience this as a kind of a lullaby sung by a parent who's in one world, to a child who's in another world. It's a beautiful oceanic and specific piece of music. Which other words? The Stebic clone.

No, I don't. Tell me what it means. I a cool word. It means pertaining to the deepest parts of the ocean isn't a killer word. It's a word to sink into. Here we go then.

The Pathetic Requiem by John Leaf's performed by the Hull Games Church Moutet Choir, David Mitchell, you were a teenage poet with, I understand, a nom de plume.

Tell me about your secret life as James Bolívar. Oh, no, no, no. Everybody knows.

So as James Bolívar, I would write poems and slips in through the letterbox of the vicar who printed the Village magazine. Sounds like something from Enid Lightner. That was it literally under veil of night.

Yes. Because if you're a young teenager going to a comprehensive school, it wasn't that my school was particularly rough or anything, but it is deeply unwise to get a reputation as someone who likes either classical music or who enjoys poetry. You simply can't. Hopefully it's not so bad these days. Now, the poems weren't any good, but it was still a good day's work. And you have to sort of get through that stage to then one day write something that is any good.

But what I did then and what to do now, what they have in common is this trance like state you go in and it's really nice to be there.

You were obviously creative. Where do you inherited that from your parents perhaps? I think that's likely. They were both artists. They're still with us, so they are both artists. Sometimes when I say that people imagine a kind of Bloomsbury esque swinging bohemian childhood, it really wasn't that Dad worked in the design department at Worcester and Mum was a freelance floral artist, but it was a million where mum and dad would sit down at the weekends in front of a drawing board, just a sheet of white paper, and there'd be a vase of flowers from a garden in front of them and they'd enter, I suppose, that trance state of their own for hours and hours, usually with rage before on in the background, which I'm sure is when I first heard the Desert Island Discs music, and then I'd come back from whatever I was doing a few hours later and that piece of white paper had been transformed.

And there was this thing on there that's just a thing of beauty, a watercolor representation of what was in front of them. And maybe without even thinking for a moment that that's what they were doing. They were actually teaching me that. I was teaching me a few things. Art is about the concentration. It's not about Sydney being kissed by the muse. It's work. It requires discipline and thoughtfulness. I think they're also teaching me that, believe it or not, you can earn a living from this.

And finally, I suppose they're very peaceful. They were tranquil. They were grounded. They were calm. After an afternoon in front of the drawing board, though, that kind of person. Anyway, I think that helps. But I could see what I did to them and it was a good thing.

We're going to take a break. The music. This is desk number three. David, tell me about it.

Well, this is Mercury by Sufjan Stevens. This is one of those time and place songs. If you're lucky, you have a few golden seasons in your life. And some three years ago, I spent in Chicago working on a screen project with a couple of friends, and this song came out at that time. And so, Sasha, Lahner, if you listen to this, this one's for us.

And I know that I've known to be. Mercury composed and performed by Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Daschner, Nick Amirli and James McAllister, David Mitchell, one of your novels, Black Swan Green, is semiautobiographical and like you, its narrator, Jason Taylor develops a stammer. When did yours appear?

I think you always have it. It's a recessive gene that kind of can be triggered by environmental factors, but it's still pretty murky. And we're a couple of Einsteinian linguist's away, I think, from really understanding what a stammer is. It kind of got activated probably about age six or seven. A teacher asked a question. I remember this quite clearly at primary school and the answer was Napoleon. And I knew the answer. And I put my hand up and I couldn't say it.

And it was the first time in my life I couldn't say it. I was a very late speaker and start speaking to about five. And so I was going to speech therapists initially, not for disfluency, but for non fluency. But yeah, I remember that day, I couldn't say Napoleon and I remember kids faces looking at me as as I blocked. And it's still here to this day. You. Live with them and you can come to, better or worse, working accommodations with them, but certainly from six through to about 11, 12, 13, it was pretty pronounced.

I really couldn't say what I wanted to. I didn't I had not yet grafted on the coping mechanisms that I grafted on now that allow me to do a radio for interview.

For example, you've written very movingly about your experience with managing and eventually making peace with your stammer. What helped you find that working accommodation?

Well, Vidi Black Swan Green really got me thinking about it. It was really good for me. I guess I was about 30, 31 at the time. Maybe a little later. It was something I didn't really want to think about because I was bought into this idea that it's a pretty prevalent if you try hard enough, you won't stammer. It's a question of willpower. And I haven't yet internalized the bleeding. The obvious observation that no one has willpower, like a stammer even to pick the phone up an ounce of it.

It requires 10 times, 20 times the willpower that a fluent person needs, but already people whose willpower is a superpower. Yet there's still this idea that if only we tried harder, we wouldn't stammer. That's a pernicious myth. That's simply wrong. And so just stopping thinking that really helped and then thinking about my stammer, not as this enemy that was out to get me, but as almost a fellow symbiont that I was sharing a mind with sharing a body with.

This is going to sound a bit weird and spooky and novelistic. But once I started thinking of my stammer not as an enemy within, but as a fellow passenger in my mind who needed a bit of time to stammer. And if he was, he for heaven knows what reason, maybe because I mean, if I gave him space and if I let him stammer and didn't hate him or didn't feel.

Mortified by him, then he would give me space in return, but it kind of worked and it works now and occasionally I'll stammer at an event and I'll just say hello. I seem to be stammering today a little bit and the audience usually laugh that on my side. And I relax.

And then and then I can move on from the block of time to your next piece of music. What are you taking to the island next and why?

So we're going to hear in DIA, the novel by Sophia Bullrush, composed by Labeler Cuban composer, especially for guitar. This fits into the sustenance category. It is ultimately mysterious. I love this piece of music in part because I can't describe why or how I love it. It makes me feel things I can't quite name and gives me memories that I don't think I've had, which is utterly mysterious. It's all wrapped up in music. Listen to it and I think you'll know what I mean.

When he died in November, he performed by Javier Bariloche, composed by Leo Brouwer, David Mitchell, you studied English and American literature at Kent University. Sounds like a very useful course for a writer to take. How did you get on?

I enjoyed my time very much. I wasn't particularly diligent student. It was actually the things around the edges that I think I benefited from. Most say the afternoons in the library where you just go down a rabbit hole and find things or clubs. I was a part of the bell ringing club, all things that appear in in future books.

I've noticed you started teaching English as a foreign language in Sicily and then in London. How serious were you about writing during this period?

I can never really remember a time when I didn't want to be a writer yet. It wasn't until a little bit later in my mid twenties when I realized that you're not young forever and it's not enough to be talented and it's not enough to aspire, you actually have to be disciplined as well and get rid of whatever social life you might have and sell the TV in those days. This is all free Internet. Luckily for me, get something done and get something finished.

That is easily the most useful advice you can give to an aspiring writer. Just finish something. It doesn't matter if it's any good, just finish it. Then you can worry about making it good. I hadn't yet reached that stage, so I was writing. I was writing on index cards because I read that that's how Nabokov wrote his novels. And I thought, well, it was good enough for him, it's good enough for me. But I didn't really get organized until a year or so into living in Japan when I was 25 or 26.

Yeah. So you moved to Hiroshima to teach English in 1994. What appealed to you about going there?

It was just a roll of the dice. I was seeing a young Japanese lady in London and when she went back, I had another friend who was teaching at a school in Hiroshima and she was able to get me a job there. And it was the last time in my life where everything I owned, I could just put in a backpack and fly out there. So that's what I did. When you're young, sometimes life is a bit of a board game and you roll the dice and you move, you count and you land on a square which sends you to another square without that much thought.

But of course, where you land can then have a much greater effect on where you are and how things turn out further down the line.

It's time for your next desk. What are we going to hear and why have you chosen this today? This is a personal song. So Anima by Milton Nascimento. This is a hymn to one's own soul for me, the rhythm of the song. It's the pulse of blood in your veins. It's not narcissistic, but it's about gratitude for being here. It's sung in Portuguese Brazilian, which, as you will know, Lauren as a singer, is possibly the most romantic language on Earth.

And it was there swirling in the background when I met the young lady who I am still married to. So it's kind of a song for my wife and of my wife and of the soul that we me. Mean told us to be mayor in the. Victory by the devil that he believed was simply this for the. Anima by Milton Nascimento, Sir David Mitchell, that song for your wife of your wife Keiko, you met while living in Japan and it was a definitive time because you also wrote your first novel there.

Who did you send it to?

You have my first two novels in Japan, plus a little bit of Cloud Atlas. In fact, my first novel, I thought 20 was a magic number. So if I send it to 13 publishers and seven agents, I got my mum to send me the writers and artists yearbook again. This still being just about every Internet and I think I got about four replies back, but immediately I was already thinking about the next one, so that didn't matter.

So the replies weren't positive? No, they weren't. What I did get back was a friendly reply from an agent, Curtis Brown. He was like, sure. And he said, the next time we were in London, just drop in and we'll have a chat. And I did that. And he was really nice. And I started talking about the book that became my first novel ghostwritten. I was about halfway through it at that point and he sounded interested and said, let me see the whole thing.

So so I did. And he became my first agent and I'm still with the agency to this day. It's time for desk, David.

It's music. What are we going to hear next and why?

This is another person's song, Mrs. Stilo by Gorillaz. My son has played this more often than Damon Albarn, who actually wrote the thing has heard it. I'm quite sure he's played it hundreds and hundreds of times, usually in the car. When we're going somewhere as a family, we take it in, turns to put a song on the phone and my son's first or second choice is always Stilo by Gorillaz. I think when you play something that often, then a little bit of your soul transfers itself into the song.

So when I'm on my island, I'll play this and my son will magically, temporarily appear in the holographic form for the duration of the song.

Coming up of. Star. Guerrilla's and Stilo, featuring Bobby Womack and Mos Def, so David Mitchell, that track for your son, you want to take to the island with you if you possibly could, at least in some form. How has being his dad changed you?

Well, my son's autistic and there's anyone in these shoes can attest. I think autism parenting is neurotypical parenting on steroids times 20. You can get pretty intense. I hope, however, ultimately it's made me a better person than I otherwise would have been. It forces you to learn things just to get through to Friday. And then when you get to the finally to get to the Monday, you've got to be more patient. You have to not care about the weird glances, weird look should be getting from people if your kid has a meltdown in public.

So, David, there is a growing movement calling for better understanding of neurodiversity. What would you like to see change?

I would like to see special needs assistance in schools being provided as a matter of course, rather than something you have to campaign for. That should be there for kids who need that help as a right. If we do that, then our chances of turning these kids into a fully functioning, fully contributing members of society in the future is massively increased. I suppose I'm asking for Utopia here, but if we don't have some idea of where Utopia is, we have no idea of which way to head.

So I'll go ahead and ask for Utopia. Could we please just have a society that is kinder and more tolerant and more understanding that we're not all the same yet? We still have value and worth, even if we don't conform to the majority's idea of what is normal and what is ordinary. I think if we do that, then actually our capacity to wrestle that utopia closer to where we are gets strengthened because people do think differently. People think idiosyncratically, have so much to offer.

But that potential at the moment just isn't being tapped as it should be. It would benefit us all neurotypical people included, if we could start doing these things.

It's time to go to the music desk. No.7, what is it and why have you chosen it today?

December seven is in a sentimental mood by Duke Ellington and John Coltrane. I love this. This is in the sustenance category. I think its compositions are a bit like the TARDIS. It's simple, short and sweet on the outside, but inside it's got rooms and these rooms lead to more rooms. It's really magical. It sounds a bit like a two man show, Ellington and Coltrane, but I'd ask you to listen out for Elvin Jones drums as well, because they are equally virtuosic.

Duke Ellington's in a sentimental mood performed by Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, David Mitchell. You still have a long career ahead of you. At least 94 years, to be exact. Tell me about the book that you wrote that's due to be published in 2014.

This is all part of a long term artwork by a Scottish artist called Katy Patterson. The idea is to plant a small forest of trees in the outskirts of Oslo. That's part one, part two for the next hundred years, from 2014 to 21, 13 or 14. One author will be approached and asked to contribute one piece of writing. This will be stored in the National Library of Norway in Oslo in a purpose built room part three in 21, 12, 21, 13.

The trees, which will be fully grown spruces by then, will be turned into paper and 100 years worth of books will be printed on them. That's the Future Library Project in a not very small nutshell. When I was approached with the idea, I wasn't quite sure how for real it was. But then I learned that Margaret Atwood had gone first. So if it's good enough for Margaret Atwood, it's good enough for me. For me, it was a great affirmation in the future to hand over a manuscript that no one else will ever read.

That there isn't another copy of anywhere is to believe there will still be readers and still civilisation and still culture and still no way and still trees and still libraries and years from now. And a part of me likes to think that by saying yes, by voting for that future, I make it ever so slightly, fractionally more likely to come about. It's almost time to cast you away, of course. Are there any aspect of being marooned that you're looking forward to the first few months?

A bit of peace and quiet, a few projects I'd like to do. After a while, though, I would start to miss people and I'd want to get back time for one more desk before we send you there. Then what's it going to be?

Well, this is a Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti K four six six, to be precise. I've been fascinated by Dominika Scarnati for years. In his day, he was an unknown pretty much run of the mill harpsichord tutor for the Queen of Spain, and his dad, Alessandra was much more famous, but for reasons no one really knows. Five years before he died, Domenico Scarlatti started writing these sonatas for harpsichord at this unbelievable prodigious rate. He wrote about 555 in about five years, one every three days or so.

Even the most ordinary of them is my at least really good. And the best ones sound just transcendental. I'd love to write about him one day and having this disc on the island would keep me putting wood on the rescue fire and keep the S.O.S shell pattern well maintained because I want to live long enough to get off the island and write my Domenico Scarlatti novel.

Scarlatti Sonata in F minor key four six six played by Give Gaine Supan, so David Mitchell, I'm going to send you away to the island and I'll be giving you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare to take with you and you can take one other book.

What will it be? I'd like to take a book of Chinese kanji, as I call them, in Japanese, the characters that you need about three or four thousand of to be fully literate in Japanese. I've got a few hundred so I can read relatively basic stuff. But I would like to use my time on the island to fully master the Chinese characters so that when I'm rescued, I will be able to read the Japanese classics and impress my wife with my beautiful flowing beautifully calligraphy renditions of the Chinese characters.

So that is the book I'd like to take, please.

You can also have a luxury item. What would you like to make your stay more pleasurable?

Okay, well, I thought about this for almost as long as I thought about the songs. What I'm going to miss are the serendipitous encounters with strangers and people and their language. It'll be a bit like lockdown, but worse lockdown without zoom. And in that many years of its history, Desert Island Discs has become this Library of Babel of human stories, experience and language. So what I'd like to take are the archives of all episodes of Desert Island Discs, so that it's this hunger for company and for voices that aren't my own will be assuaged.

Well, David, it is a very cheeky request on your part, but on the basis that we have in the past, had castaways who've taken archive recordings of Test Match Special and The Archers and programs like that to the island in our time very recently as well.

I'm going to allow it. I'm going to allow it the softness of my own heart.

Thank you. Fist pump might drop and I will moonwalk out of the room.

And finally, which track would you save from the waves if you are to rescue just one of the eight discs that you've shared with us today?

I would like to keep Anima by Milton Nascimento, please.

David Mitchell, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you.

I can die happy. I've been on Desert Island Discs. I really hope you enjoyed that interview with the writer David Mitchell. We have, of course, cast many authors away over the years. They include Unwrite, Ali Smith, Kingsley Amis and Ian Banks. You can hear their programs and many more from our audio library if you search through BBC Sang's. BBC sounds, music, radio, podcasts, the pipe of a new thriller from BBC sounds 80000 children go missing every single day and most returned within 24 hours before he took another shot.

He's here, the Piper, a new thriller starring Tamsin Outweight with music from Bat for Lashes, Natasha Khan. Subscribe to the pipeline on BBC Solms.