Jürgen Becker (1932–2024) was born in Cologne. From 1939 to 1947, he lived in Erfurt. After graduating from high school and briefly dropping out of university, he began his career as a freelance writer; for years he earned his living by working in various jobs, as a labourer and employee, as an advertising assistant and journalist. He worked for the WDR radio station and for the Rowohlt and Suhrkamp publishing houses. For twenty years, until 1993, he was head of the radio drama department at Deutschlandfunk (German Radio).

The fall of communism and reunification had a decisive influence on Jürgen Becker's writing and motivated several of his poetry collections as well as his first novel, Aus der Geschichte der Trennungen , published in the summer of 1999. Jürgen Becker was a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin-Brandenburg, the German Academy for Language and Poetry, the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature and German PEN.

His work has been honoured with numerous awards, including the Gruppe 47 Prize and the Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. In 2014, he received the Georg Büchner Prize. At the time, the German Academy for Language and Poetry honoured Jürgen Becker as an ‘authoritative voice of contemporary poetry’. The jury's statement continued: ‘His work has had a decisive influence on German-language poetry for generations. In his work, which has grown over decades, he has persistently remeasured and changed the genre boundaries of poetry and prose.’

Most recently, Suhrkamp Verlag published the poetry collection Nachspielzeit and the work Die Rückkehr der Gewohnheiten , in which poems, notations, series of sentences and prose pieces are collected in a journal. Martin Oehlen ( Frankfurter Rundschau ) wrote of the latter: ‘If the deluge were to come now, one of the most noble tasks would be to save Jürgen Becker's books. They are a literary archive of the years we know.’ Suhrkamp published Becker's Collected Poems ( Gesammelte Gedichte ) in a single-volume edition in 2022.