Ulrich Schreiber was born in Solingen in 1951. He learned the bricklayer's trade, completed his secondary school leaving certificate in evening classes and, after studying civil engineering in Wuppertal, obtained his general university entrance qualification. He then studied philosophy, politics and Russian at the Free University of Berlin from 1973-1981 and passed the Second State Examination in Celle in 1984.

From 1979 to 1981 he was an editor of the journal Moderne Zeiten. In 1980 he was co-founder of the Berlin and in 1983 founder of the Hamburg People's University. In 1985 he was the director of the German-Italian Cultural Festival in Hamburg and of a congress on Antonio Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg. In the 1980s and 1990s he worked as a cultural manager and building architect in Hamburg, Stuttgart and Berlin. In 1989 he founded the International Peter Weiss Society, which he chaired until 1998. In 1998 he organised the Thomas Bernhard Days in Berlin.

During the Erlangen Poetenfest in 1998, the idea of a literature festival in Berlin arose, which he founded in 2001 and has directed ever since. The international literature festival berlin is an event of the Peter Weiss Foundation for Art and Politics e. V. The main sponsors are the Capital Cultural Fund and the Federal Foreign Office.  Schreiber has organised Worldwide Readings since 2006 and Worldwide Screenings since 2020. In 2017 he realised the film What Matters about human rights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvNbnPzksyE.

Schreiber was one of the co-initiators of the PEN World Voices Festival in New York in 2005 and of a literature festival in Mumbai in 2007, and has been the founder and director of the Odessa International Literature Festival since 2015. He is a member of the PEN Centre Germany. In 2015, he received the order "Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettre" from the French Ministry of Culture for his "contribution to the radiance of the arts and literature in France and in the world".