[1] David Davidar was born in Nagercoil, Kanyakumari district, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
[3] He attended Sainik School, Amaravathinagar, in Tiruppur district, and then earned a BSc degree in Botany from Madras Christian College in 1979.
As its first Editor, and later Publisher, Davidar edited or published a distinguished line-up of authors including Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Seth, Ruskin Bond, Kiran Desai, Romila Thapar, Rajmohan Gandhi, Arundhati Roy, Pavan K. Varma, Khushwant Singh, Vikram Chandra, Salman Rushdie, Dom Moraes, William Dalrymple, Damon Galgut, and Nandan Nilekani.
In 2004, he moved to Toronto, Canada, as Publisher, Penguin Canada, where the authors he published included Philip Roth, Khaled Hosseini, John Le Carre, Stieg Larsson, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Fatima Bhutto, Amitav Ghosh, Margaret Macmillan, Zadie Smith, Kim Echlin, Hisham Matar, Joseph Boyden, Adrienne Clarkson, and John Ralston Saul.
It was greeted with acclaim throughout the English-speaking world and was eventually published in sixteen countries and translated into as many languages.
[10] Davidar's second novel, The Solitude of Emperors, which was based on his experiences as a journalist, and the outrage he felt at the communal riots that took place in India in the 1990s, was published in 2007,[11] and was short-listed for a Commonwealth Writers Prize.