David Clive King was born in Richmond, Surrey, England in 1924 but spent most of his childhood in Ash, a small village some 30 miles from London on the Kentish North Downs, where he and his three brothers used to play in a disused chalk pit. He was a boarder at King's School, Rochester at a time when every boy expected to be called up for the armed services in World War Two, and he opted for the Navy. This gave him seagoing experience that took him to the Arctic, Australia and the Far East, where he witnessed the recent devastation of Hiroshima.
He returned with a post-war grant to Downing College, Cambridge, where he read English and Russian. The British Council offered him jobs, mostly concerned with teaching English, in Amsterdam, Belfast, Aleppo and Damascus, Beirut, Dhaka and Madras. Many of these places provided settings for the stories he was writing. In 1973, he became a full-time writer, heartened by the growing popularity of his third book, Stig of the Dump. He settled with his second wife in a marshman's cottage in Norfolk, which they converted. Their child, Emma, is growing up there and they ride their horses together. He now has seven grandchildren.
