After obtaining a degree in physics in 1986, Tzveta Sofronieva earned a PhD in 1991 with a thesis on how culture influences the transfer of knowledge. During her doctoral work she studied poetry with Joseph Brodsky. Research trips took her to the United States, Canada and Great Britain. From 1993-2000, she worked as a cultural correspondent for Radio Free Europe in Berlin.

Sofronieva has published poems, essays, theater texts, stories, adaptations and cultural studies articles since the early 1980s. She learned German at the age of 28, it was her fifth acquired language. Her short stories and essays, written in German, have been widely anthologized since 1995. She published her first German language poems in the journal Akzente und Manuskripte in 2007. In the mid-1990s, she initiated the network Verbotene Worte which focuses on the memory of the words in multilingual contexts.