David Salariya

David Salariya is a Scottish writer, artist, and designer of Indian ancestry. He founded The Salariya Book Company, a publisher of children's literature. He has created and designed numerous children's book series, including the You Wouldn't Want To Be series... He writes as David Stewart and Max Marlborough. David attended Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art Dundee, where he studied illustration and printmaking before focusing on book design during his postgraduate year. He studied art education at the University of Sussex, then moving to London he worked in a bakery in Hillington and started freelancing as an illustrator, working with Reader's Digest in London and then Giunti Marzocco in Florence. In 1985, David began to conceive, create, design, and commission children's nonfiction books, working as a 'packager' for publishers such as Franklin Watts and Simon & Schuster, creating many new series such as Inside Story, Spectacular Visual Guides, Timelines, The X Ray Picture Books, How Would You Survive, and many more. David founded The Salariya Book Company in 1989, together with its imprints Book House, Scribblers, and Scribo, with the goal of creating an independent children's publishing firm which prioritised creativity, inclusion, humour, and quality. In 1999, David designed the best-selling You Wouldn't Want to be... series, which has been translated into 36 languages. David, always eager to adopt emerging technology, collaborated on CD-ROMs in 1995 and Augmented Reality in 2010. In 2010 his company was the winner of the IPG Children’s Publisher of the Year award. In 2017 David launched the Stratford-Salariya Children's Picture Book Prize at the Stratford Literary Festival for unpublished picture book writers and artists. With over 1200 titles translated into many languages and published worldwide, the fiercely independent The Salariya Book Company collaborated with outstanding illustrators, authors, and experts to create a platform for producing high-quality children's books which effortlessly blended words and visuals. The Global Pandemic brought many problems as well as illness for David - he sold his business in 2022, marking the end of one chapter in his career but now fully recovered he is working on new projects. David was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2023, and he has participated in group art shows at The Royal Scottish Academy, Compass Gallery, and Stirling Gallery. The University of Dundee's collection includes three of his works.