David Stewart

David Stewart is an American expat who has lived in Spain since 2020. Born and raised in California, he was an elite distance swimmer who headed east to swim and study at Princeton University, then spent the next few decades founding IT companies, which is roughly the dry-land version of swimming laps in a very small pool.

In 2020, with the world locked indoors, he watched his kids attend school as a grid of frozen faces on a laptop, and noticed that American social life had been reduced to waving at the neighbors from the driveway. Spain was not exactly open for business either, but it was clearly having more fun being closed. People there still went out after work, to a bar, a plaza or a cousin’s balcony, instead of going home, shutting the door and calling it a night at 6:15. So he packed up the kids and moved to a country where dinner starts at ten and nobody has ever eaten alone on purpose.

He traded a functioning bureaucracy for a functioning social life, and he would make the same deal again, though possibly with more photocopies. Somewhere between the server rooms and the siestas he found his true calling: writing about the absurd ironies and quiet eccentricities of everyday life, out of real affection for a country that does things its own way, even when those things make no sense at all.

Spain Is Broken… And I’m Never Leaving: Confessions of a Reluctantly Happy Expat is his first book. He lives in Barcelona, where he is still waiting for his cita previa.