David Charles Manners is a British writer published in four languages. He is a representative for the charity Diversity Role Models, and the co-founder of Sarvashubhamkara, a charity that provides medical care, education and human contact to socially excluded individuals and communities on the Indian subcontinent, most of whom are affected by the stigma of leprosy.
Background
David's mother was raised in Sussex, his father on India's North-West Frontier and in East Punjab. David was raised in a Mormon family, but was excommunicated by a church court at the age of 20 for being gay. He is the 3+great-grandson of Dr. Charles Thomas Pearce.
Education and career
David worked as a theatre designer, primarily with Adventures in Motion Pictures. He was appointed Design Associate with the company in 1992. His designs included Matthew Bourne's Infernal Galop, Deadly Serious, The Percys of Fitzrovia and Drip: a Narcissistic Love Story. 2012 saw Infernal Galop revived by Bourne's New Adventures, as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of the founding of his companies. He also designed the first Italian translation of Bernstein's Candide for Graham Vick at Batignano, Tuscany. David designed and/or made costumes for performance artistRose English, dance company Moving Mountains, theatre company 20th-Century Vixen and Glyndebourne Festival Opera. Awarded a BA Music degree from Newton Park College, Bath, he went on to train in Physical Medicine and subsequently worked for thirteen years as Physical Therapist with musicians, conductors and singers at Glyndebourne Festival Opera. He is a contributor to various journals including the National Geographic Traveller magazine. David writes in French and was commissioned to provide an article for the publication Memoire d'Opale in 2018. Le cœur si doux et si tendre - Lettres d’amour interdites à Montreuil-sur-Mer describes the set of secret love letters he discovered at the back of a family diary dating from the Franco-Prussian War. His first book, In the Shadow of Crows, was published in 2009 by Reportage Press, A second edition, published by Signal Books, was released in August 2011. David spent 2011 in collaboration with Jerwood Award-winning choreographer and director Ben Wright, creating text to inspire a new work for the dance company bgroup, which was taken on a national tour in the UK. His second book, Limitless Sky, was released by Rider, a Random House division, in June 2014. It has subsequently been published in translation, in both Lithuanian and Turkish. Lithuania's television channel tv3 recommended Limitless Sky in its 20 Best Books for the Summer in 2015. The book is referenced by the OED for the use of the term faggot. In 2015, David was interviewed for inclusion in the schools handbook How to Create Kind Schools by Jenny Hulme, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the national anti-bullying charity Kidscape. David was commissioned in 2018 to write a script for the Stables Theatre, Hastings. Here at Last is Love is based on personal interviews and unpublished letters written by members of the Pink Sink set – a group of gay army officers and M.I.5 agents, who met at the lower bar at the Ritz during the London Blitz. These included Terence Rattigan, Desmond Carrington, Paul Dehn, Dunstan Thompson and Michael Pitt-Rivers, all of whom gathered around a socially-ostracised, single mother affectionately known as Sodomy Johnson, 'the Buggers' Vera Lynn'. Here at Last is Love is scheduled for full production in The Stables' 2020 season.
