David Homel was born in Chicago in 1952. He left at the end of the 1960s and lived in Europe and Toronto before moving to Montreal around 1980. He was educated in three countries and worked at a variety of industrial jobs before beginning to write fiction in the mid-1980s. He has been a journalist, editor, literary translator, and teacher. He is the author of five published novels and has a great deal of experience in both teaching and public readings in all settings.

Homel has followed the American tradition of socially engaged, historical novels. He is the author of The Speaking Cure, published in French as L'analyste. His previous novels include Electrical Storms, Rat Palms, Sonya & Jack and Get on Top. Homel believes that writing is not the realm of the "happy few," but instead belongs to everyone. He shows classes and groups how to locate and develop the stories that are within their reach.

He won the Governor General's Award for Translation in 1995 for Dany Laferriere's Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex (Douglas and MacIntyre).