David Savill

David Savill is a British novelist and teacher whose fiction draws on journalism, international settings, and the long consequences of public catastrophe. They Are Trying to Break Your Heart, his first novel, connects lives altered by the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s with the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The narrative follows Marko Novak, whose search for missing relatives becomes entangled with British journalist Anya Teal and later events in Thailand. Bloomsbury published the book in 2016, and it was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Savill lived in Bosnia during the final year of the conflict and later researched the work of identifying missing people after the tsunami, experiences that inform the novel's attention to memory, displacement, and incomplete knowledge. Rather than treating separate disasters as spectacle, he concentrates on how witnesses carry uncertainty across years and borders. Savill has taught creative writing, bringing a reporter's concern with testimony together with a novelist's interest in fractured chronology and moral responsibility.