This German novelist and essayist is one of the most important writers of former East Germany. She studied at Leipzig and Halle Universities and later worked as a reader and editor until 1962, the year in which she resigned to focus exclusively on writing.

In her first novel, The Shared Sky (1963), she describes the relationship between a man that leaves East Germany and goes to work in West Germany, and a woman who stays in East Germany to take part in the construction of a socialist country. Two of her later novels, The Quest for Christa T (1969) and Patterns of Childhood (1976), are set in the final years of the Second World War and the first development of the German Democratic Republic.

Other narrations by Wolf include Under the Lime Trees (1974), and Cassandra (1983). Her expulsion from the GDR's Writers Committee caused her to have a somber and disillusioned view of the future of modern societies. In her short novel What Remains, written in 1979 but published in 1990, she makes a reference to what it was like being under the surveillance of the Stasi, the GDR's State Security Police; this writing raised enormous controversy, especially after it was revealed that Wolf herself had been a Stasi informant.