Dorothee Riese was born in Duderstadt near Göttingen and emigrated to Romania with her parents as a child. She studied Slavic Studies and the culture and history of Central and Eastern Europe and is a graduate of the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. Dorothee worked at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris and the Buchenwald Memorial in Weimar. She was the editor of the Tippgemeinschaft 2017 and the winner of the Werkstatt für Junge Literatur Graz 2018. She was involved in the exhibition project leningradski feminism 1979 and is part of the authors group other writers, which advocates the perspectives and rights of authors with children. After working in Tübingen and Frankfurt an der Oder, Moscow, Barnaul and St. Petersburg, she lives with her family in Leipzig.

In Schöppingen, Dorothee Riese worked on the conclusion of her novel „Karpaten“. The text is about the growing up of an emigrant child in Romania in the 1990s.