Maria Rajer was born in 1987 in Ust-Kamenogorsk (Kazakhstan) and lives in Berlin. She studied Slavic and German at the St. Petersburg State University and the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Since 2013 she has been working as a freelance literary translator from Russian. Among the authors she has translated are Mascha Alechina, Dmitri Gluchowski, Wassili Grossman, Viktor Mazin, Pavel Pepperstein and Andrej Platonov.

Maria Rajer also translates regularly for the journalistic online platform dekoder.org.