Malaka Talwatte

Malaka Talwatte began collecting at seventeen, while reading engineering at the University of Warwick. He spent the holidays with his grandmother in London, and his days in the city's antiquarian booksellers and print-and-map dealers, where a student's budget slowly became a collection: the topographical record of pre-modern Ceylon, its early maps, its books and its prints. In time the modern painters drew him in, above all the '43 Group, whose work he began to gather and still collects, and from there the collecting widened to the artists who came around and after them. Out of a lifetime of that collecting has come the research and the writing set down on this site.

He currently chairs the George Keyt Foundation, founded in 1988 in the name of the painter George Keyt, whose annual street fair, Kala Pola, brings hundreds of artists before a public of tens of thousands. Under his chairmanship the Foundation has carried Sri Lankan art onto the international stage. In 2024 it partnered Sotheby's for the first sale the house had ever conducted in the country: a charity auction held to international standard that proved an outright success, raising well beyond expectation, every lot sold and the auctioneer awarded the white glove that marks a clean sale. In 2026, with the British High Commission, it opened '19th Century Views of Ceylon' at Westminster House, the first exhibition the residence had ever shown to the public. Entry was free, a principle Malaka holds to, that the record of the island should be open to everyone; the accompanying book, which he wrote, sold out within two days and was straight back in print.

The collecting has run alongside a working life spent building companies across an unusually wide field. He is the founder and chief executive of Saffron Leisure, whose boutique hotels and villas include Elliot House, a restored colonial bungalow in Galle, and Teal Ahangama. Before it he co-founded and led ventures later sold on to larger houses: Lifeline Pharmaceuticals, built into one of the twenty largest in its sector before its sale in 2020; UPay, among the first fintech payment platforms on the island, sold to SDB Bank; Credence Genomics, the country's first commercial next-generation sequencing laboratory; and DeVogue, an eco apparel maker whose workforce was more than nine-tenths women. He has chaired the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, the oldest broadcaster in South Asia, and sits on the boards of the Hayleys plantation companies, Horana, Talawakelle and Kelani Valley. His first years were in telecommunications, with Nortel Networks across Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia.

He holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Manufacturing Systems Engineering and a Master of Science in Engineering Business Management, both from the University of Warwick, and read art business at Christie's Education in London. The engineer's habit of taking a thing apart to see how it is made runs through the collecting and the writing alike: a plate is dated by its paper and its process, an attribution is tested against the record, and a claim is made only as far as the evidence will carry it.

Education

University of Warwick: BEng Manufacturing Systems Engineering; MSc Engineering Business Management · Christie's Education, London: Art Business · National University of Singapore: General Management Development Programme

Present roles

Chairman, The George Keyt Foundation · Founder & CEO, Saffron Leisure · Director, Hayleys plantation companies