David Avidan was born in Tel Aviv on February 21st, 1934. He studied at Tel Aviv's Shalva High School and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  At the beginning of the fifties, he was a member of the Young Communist League of Israel and his first poems were published in the Israeli Communist Party newspaper Kol Ha-Am.

The first anthology of his poetry, Lipless Faucets, was published in 1954. Avidan continued to publish poetry collections until his last years, wrote film scripts, directed, and was involved in other fields of art.

Tonight We Go Out, the first recording by The Twins Trio in 1966 includes the song Hit The Road Ruth, Avidan's translation of Hit the Road Jack by Ray Charles and other of his songs: We Are Not Dancers, It's Not So Bad and Shabbat. Some of his poems have been set to music and performed by Israeli artists. Avidan was interested in innovative technology and the ways they could be used in his work. His book My Electronic Psychiatrist (1974) includes 8 conversations between Avidan and Eliza, the computer program written by Joseph Weizenbaum, which won wide-scale acclaim as a pioneering step in artificial intelligence.

Avidan translated some of his books to English, and others were translated to additional languages, including French, Russian and Arabic. He was awarded the Bialik Prize for Literature in 1994. David Avidan died in Tel Aviv on May 11th, 1995.