Wilms was born in Tirana and grew up in the Albanian port of Durrës.

[1] On the maternal side, she comes from a family of rich and politically influential beys who were expropriated and disempowered after 1945 as enemies of the communist regime.

[1] As a DAAD scholarship holder, she came to Berlin in 1994, and has been living there ever since as a writer and publicist.

In August 2012, she published her first novel in German Das albanische Öl oder Mord auf der Straße des Nordens (The Albanian Oil or Murder on the Road of the North) in Berlin, based on historical research.

[3] The novel is set in the 1920s and is described as "an exotic, burlesque episode from the history of the young Albanian nation in the form of a political thriller".