After her parents fled Kamenz in 1945, Angelika Mechtel grew up in West Germany and attended Waldorf and a convent school.
Mechtel worked in many genres and wrote novels, poems, short stories, reportages, children's books, radio plays and scripts for television films.
At the writers' congress in Mainz in March 1983, she was elected to the federal board of the Verband deutscher Schriftsteller (VS), today in ver.di, of which she was a member until April 1984.
Angelika Mechtel fell ill with breast cancer in 1987 and suffered a relapse in 1993, which forced her to give up her commitment to persecuted writers all over the world.
After her death, at her request, her remains were cremated, and her ashes were buried at sea in the spring of 2000 where she had last lived – in the bay of Boquerón in Puerto Rico.