David Swarbrick

David Swarbrick is a publisher, planter, hotelier, hermit, and writer.

He was born in Colombo and raised, with few concessions to modernity, in India, Singapore, Dubai, and the Middle East. Cornish, he gained his degrees on the Celtic fringe, with a joint honours at the University of Wales; and an M. Phil at the University of Stirling, deferring an introduction to regular working hours for as long as was decently possible.

Having worked at News Corp’s HarperCollins UK as board director for sales, marketing and various other otherwise homeless departments, and HarperCollins India, he ran Hachette’s consumer learning division. Prior to this, he launched Oxford University Press’s first commercial online business, Oxford Reference Online.

When the doubtful charms of boardroom bawls, bottom lines, and divas diminished, he returned to Sri Lanka, the land of his birth hundreds of years earlier, to rescue a spice plantation and set of art deco buildings that had gone feral in the jungle.

Today, as the Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, it has become one of the country’s top ten boutique hotels, run by the kindest and most professional of hospitality teams; and overseen by several small schnauzers.

The hotel helps fund the resources, books, databases, podcasts, blogs, and guides published by The Ceylon Press and all free at the point of use. The Press was set up to make Sri Lanka’s rich and complicated story, a mystery to many, and a secret to most, more accessible.