Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia, to a Hungarian mother and a Slovenian father, and spent her childhood in Budapest, Ljubljana and Trieste. From 1965–1971 she studied Slavic Languages & Literature, and Romance Languages & Literature in Zürich, Paris and St Petersburg, and in 1971 was awarded a doctorate for her dissertation on the 'Theme of Loneliness in Russian Literature', later published by Herbert Lang Verlag, (Berne, 1973).

Since 1977 she has been a Lecturer at the University of Zürich, and also a freelance writer, translator and journalist (for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Die Zeit etc). She lives in Zürich.

Ilma Rakusa is the author of several collections of poetry and prose—her prose volume Steppe , translated by Solveig Emerson, is also available in English translation (from Burning Deck, Providence, 1997) — and is a busy translator from French, Russian, Serbo-Croat and Hungarian, the authors including Marguerite Duras, Marina Tsvetaeva, Alexei Remizov, Danilo Kiš, Imre Kertész and Péter Nádas.