Dahlia Ravikovitch was born in Ramat Gan in 1936. She learned to read and write at the age of three. Her father, Levi, was a Russian-born Jewish engineer who arrived in the British Mandate of Palestine from China. Her mother, Michal, was a teacher who came from a religious household. When Dahlia was six, her father was run over and killed by a drunken driver. She moved to Kibbutz Geva with her mother but did not fit into the collectivist mentality and at 13 moved to a foster home in Haifa, the first of several foster homes.

Ravikovitch married at 18, but divorced after three months. Her subsequent marriages also ended in divorce. She has one son, Ido Kalir. After completing her service in the Israel Defense Forces, she studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She worked as a journalist and high school teacher. She translated WB Yeats, TS Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mary Poppins into Hebrew. Ravikovitch was active in the Israeli peace movement. From her home in central Tel Aviv she collaborated with artists, musicians and public figures seeking peace, equality and social justice.

During the last years of her life, she suffered from severe bouts of depression. On August 21, 2005, Ravikovitch was found dead in her apartment. Initial reports speculated the cause of death to be suicide, but the autopsy determined the cause to be sudden heart irregularities.