Tundra author Jack Mitchell was born in New Brunswick and grew up in Ottawa, Ontario. At the age of fourteen, his admiration for J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings prompted him to take Latin in high school. He has been interested in Roman history ever since. He studied Classics at McGill University and holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University, where he wrote his first novel, The Roman Conspiracy. Jack Mitchell lives in Toronto, Ontario.
