David Murphy was born on Easter Sunday in Ponca City, Oklahoma. He grew up in Oklahoma and Louisiana where he developed a love for reading, writing, skateboarding, baseball, and nature. He attended Oklahoma State University where he majored in History (focusing on WWII-era Europe), received a Certificate of Education, and worked as co-poetry editor of the undergraduate literary journal, Papyrus. In his free time, he wrote and skateboarded. During his senior year, he won a scholarship to study abroad in Lund, Sweden. While at Lunds universitet, he studied Viking Age rune stones and wrote an unpublishable book, skateboarded, and traveled to Denmark, Finland, and Estonia with his friends. In 2006, he began graduate school at Kansas State University where he won the Seaton Fellowship for Creative Writing, served as Fiction Editor of the literary journal, Touchstone, and, later, as Editor-in-Chief. He earned his Master's in English from KSU in the spring of 2008.

In June of 2008, David began work in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan on a project funded by The World Bank. The project's goal was to support higher education, and the project involved a collaboration between Kabul University, Balkh University, and Kansas State University. David worked first as a consultant-lecturer, then concurrently as In-Country Administrative Director. After the project's completion, he lived in Washington D.C., then worked in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for a year at King Saud University's Preparatory Year. He earned two English Language Fellowships from the U.S.

State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs who posted him to Pachuca, Mexico then to Toluca, Mexico. Following the successful completion of these postings, he lived in Nairobi, Kenya, then moved to Olympia, Washington where he worked for four years as a Program Supervisor for the state's Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. In 2018, he moved to Sayulita, Mexico to focus on writing full-time and to live near a warm ocean. When not writing novels, David enjoys reading, writing poetry, skateboarding, playing and watching sports, tying knots, playing chess, planting plants, making things, spending time with his two dogs, and being with friends and family.