WERNER SÖLLNER WAS BORN IN 1951 in the Romanian village of Horia, where his family belonged to the small German minority in the country at the time. After graduating from high school in 1970, he began the study of physics in the city of Cluj in Transylvania. However, he soon dropped this course of study, and from 1971 until 1975, when he completed his M.A. degree, he majored in German and English language and literature. In 1975, his years of writing as a student culminated in the appearance of his first collection of poems, Wetterberichte. Two more volumes of poetry followed, Mitteilungen eines Privatmannes in 1978 and Eine Entwöhnung in 1980. For a short time thereafter, he taught at a Bucharest senior high school, before moving on to work as an editor at a publishing house for children's books.

During his early years and as a student, Söllner lived under a communist dictatorship. As a youth, when the regime was still relatively liberal, he experienced a certain degree of freedom, but during his student years his thinking and writing were burdened by increasingly repressive governmental policies. In 1981, as the political situation worsened, Söllner and a few other writers tried to articulate their political opposition and protest the oppression. Meeting secretly, they read and discussed their own works and those of others.

In 1982, Söllner applied through the Romanian Writers Union for an exit pass to attend a conference of the German Writers Union in Cologne. He planned to remain in Germany and surprisingly was neither threatened nor particularly hindered by the otherwise intrusive Romanian secret police. Nonetheless, Werner Söllner did not return to Romania until after the communist dictatorship was brought down in 1989. He has since gone for visits several times but continues to reside in Frankfurt.

In 1985, Söllner published a book of prose in Germany, Es ist nicht alles in Ordnung, aber ok, yet he remained unknown to a wider audience. His first real success came from his poetry. In 1988, he was “discovered” by Germany's largest publishing house, Suhrkamp, who brought out his new volume of poems, Kopfland. Passagen. Since then, praise from leading critics has gained Söllner a place among the leading German poets. His more recent work has included several translations and a new collection of poems, Der Schlaf des Trommlers (1992).