Jack Mitchell was born in Sackville, New Brunswick, and grew up in Ottawa, Ontario. When he was fourteen, his admiration for J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" prompted him to take Latin during his first year in high school, and he has had a keen interest in Roman writers and Roman history ever since. After high school, Jack decided to become a writer: he moved to Paris for a year in 1995, where he wrote his first novel. He studied Classics at McGill University, and he is currently studying the Greek epic poetry of Homer at Stanford University in California.