David Lodge taught in the English Department of the University of Birmingham from 1960 to 1987 before retiring to write full-time. Now an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham, David holds several honorary doctorates, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was made a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was awarded a CBE services to literature in 1998.

David's novels include The Picturegoers (1960); The British Museum is Falling Down (1965); Out of the Shelter (1970); Changing Places (1975), for which he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize; How Far Can You Go?, which was the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1980; Small World, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984; Nice Work, which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award in 1988 and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Therapy (1995), a regional winner and finalist of the 1996 Commonwealth Writers Prize and Author, Author (Harvill Secker, 2004).

David's own adaptation of his novel Nice Work won him the Royal Television Society's Award for the best drama serial in 1989 and he adapted Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit for the BBC in 1994. He has also written two stage plays, The Writing Game, which he adapted for Channel 4 television, and Home Truths.

He is the author of numerous works of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction (1992), based on his weekly column in The Independent on Sunday; The Practice of Writing (1996); Consciousness and the Novel (2002) and The Year of Henry James (Harvill Secker, 2006).

David's most recent novel, Deaf Sentence, is published by Harvill Secker.