David Charles Manners

About David

David is a British writer published in four languages. His mother was raised on a dairy farm in Sussex, his father in the foothills of the Himalayas – a contrasting cultural legacy that has had a deep and lasting influence.

David is co-founder of Sarva, a charity that works in North India with people ostracised by the stigma of leprosy. He is also a representative of Diversity Role Models, a British charity that challenges homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying in schools. He is an excommunicated Mormon and an initiated Shivite.

David writes in English and French for a variety of publications, including the National Geographic Traveller Magazine, Ocean View, Sacred Hoop and Mémoire d’Opale. A recent commission has been an article for the Rattigan Society. His first book, In the Shadow of Crows, was published in two editions and translated into Spanish. His second, Limitless Sky, has been published in English, Lithuanian and Turkish.

David’s biography of his 3+great grandfather Dr. Charles Thomas Pearce, Noodles and Knaves, continues to be referenced in academic research. His latest book, The Captive Heart (to be published) - the true story of an adventurous Victorian honeymoon and an audacious kidnapping that led to love - has inspired a film script by Oscar-nominated director Michael Davies.

David has worked as stage and costume designer for a number of companies. These include five productions for Matthew Bourne’s Adventures in Motion Pictures, and Graham Vick’s Candide at Batignano. He also collaborated with choreographer-director Ben Wright, writing text to inspire a new work, The Lessening of Difference, for a national tour of the dance company bgroup.

David followed his music degree with the study of Physical Medicine and for many years worked as physical therapist and teacher of Shaiva Tantra Yoga at Glyndebourne Festival Opera, English National Opera and on the Jerwood Young Artists’ Programme. He is also a ceramicist, inspired by a lifelong fascination with Classical statuary, funerary portraits and ancestor masks, and his own forebears' initiations into the esoteric Orphic Circle.

David has spent much of his adult life between the Sussex Downs and the Eastern Himalayas.

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Plays

In 2020, David founded BallyBest Productions to stage his own plays:

Here at Last is Love - the true story of Sodomy Johnson and the Pink Sink, based on an inherited stash of remarkable wartime letters. Here at Last is Love will run at The Stables Theatre, Hastings, 25-28 May 2022.

Picture Perfect - the true story of David's relation, Margaret Chute, Hollywood's first freelance journalist, currently in pre-production with Beckman Unicorn.

The Queen of Madagascar, is the true story of a swindle perpetrated by his great-grandmother’s cousin. The script was selected in 2019 as a winner of the New Writing Competition at the Stables Theatre, Hastings.