David Pownall FRSL (19 May 1938 – 21 November 2022) was a British playwright and prolific radio dramatist performed internationally, and novelist translated into several languages.

David Pownall was born in Liverpool on 19 May 1938. He attended Lord Wandsworth College as a boarder, on a scholarship, and "disliked the place intensely". He read history at Keele University, graduating in 1960.

Pownall worked as a personnel officer with the Ford Motor Company, Dagenham, Essex, from 1960-63. In 1963, Pownall moved to Zambia to take up a post as the personnel manager at Anglo American PLC and lived and worked there until 1969; he had several early plays produced there.^{[citation needed]}

Returning to England to write full-time, he became the resident writer of the Century Theatre touring group, from 1970-72. He was resident writer of the Duke's Playhouse, Lancaster, from 1972–75, and had several plays produced by them. His plays incorporated reflections on the locality, and meditations on the plays of Shakespeare.

Pownall helped found the Paines Plough Theatre, originally based in Coventry, where he was resident writer from 1975-80. In 1977, his play Richard III, Part Two, first produced by Paines Plough, was taken to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Deeply interested in music, he wrote several plays about the challenges of composers, both in terms of personal creativity, and, in Master Class (1983), working within the oppressive political environment of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

Pownall wrote plays for radio, as well as material for performance by children and college students. The Sutton Elms website lists with dates 75 plays broadcast by BBC radio between 1972 and 2018.

As a novelist, Pownall's early work, such as The Raining Tree War (1974) and its sequel African Horse (1975) were comic novels in the mode of Evelyn Waugh. Then came historical fantasies such as White Cutter (1988), The Catalogue of Men (1999) and The Ruling Passion (2008).