He was a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts[1] and a University of Belgrade graduate.

David Albahari was born on 15 March 1948 in Peć,[1] in the former Yugoslav region of Kosovo to a Sephardic Jewish father and a mother of Serbian origin[2] (who had previously been married to an Ashkenazi Jewish man killed in the Holocaust, as were their children and as was the first family of his father, which Albahari himself defined as "Four children had to die so that I, and my sister, would be born."[3]).

Albahari published the first collection of short stories Porodično vreme ("Family Time") in 1973.

He became better known to wider audience in 1982 with a volume Opis smrti ("A Description of Death") for which he got the Andrić Prize.

[1] On 29 July 2016, Albahari won the first award at the "Druga prikazna" ("Another Story") literary festival in Skopje, Macedonia.