His earliest published books were collections of poetry, but prose writing has become a larger part of his output since the critical and commercial success of his first novel Der Verlorene (translated into English as Lost).

Treichel has also worked as an opera librettist, most prominently in collaboration with the composer Hans Werner Henze.

After graduating from high school in Hanau, he studied German philology, philosophy and political science at the Free University of Berlin, where he earned his degree in 1983 with a thesis on Wolfgang Koeppen.

[1] He habilitated in 1993 and from 1995 to March 2018 taught as Professor for German literature at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut Leipzig.

[2] (German literature institute) Treichel became known in particular through his novel The Lost (Der Verlorene), in which he set the flight of his parents from the "Eastern Territories" and the loss of their first-born son towards the end of World War II about his own childhood and youth.