David Peace was born in 1967 and grew up in Ossett, near Wakefield. He left Manchester Polytechnic in 1991, and went to Istanbul to teach English. In 1994 he took up a teaching post in Tokyo and now lives there with his family.

His formative years were shadowed by the activities of the Yorkshire Ripper, and this had a profound influence on him which led to a strong interest in crime. His quartet of Red Riding books grew from this obsession with the dark side of Yorkshire. These are powerful novels of crime and police corruption, using the Yorkshire Ripper as their basis and inspiration. They are entitled Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001), and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002), and have been translated into French, Italian, German and Japanese.

In 2003 David Peace was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'. His novel, GB84, set amid the 1984 miners' strike, was published in 2005.
His most recent books are The Damned Utd (2006), recreating Brian Clough's time at Leeds United Football Club; Tokyo Year Zero (2007) the first part of a trilogy set in Tokyo in the aftermath of World War II and Occupied City (2009), the second of the trilogy set in Tokyo.
See here a video of David Peace explaining the creative process through which he wrote The Damned Utd.