Ulli Beier was born to a Jewish family in Glowitz, Weimar Germany (modern Główczyce, Poland), in July 1922.
In Palestine, while his family were briefly detained as enemy aliens by the British authorities, Beier earned a BA as an external student from the University of London.
Due to his subsequent anthropological work among the members of the clans that are native to these places, he was awarded Yoruba honorary chieftaincies.
In 1956, after visiting the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris, France, organized by Présence Africaine at the Sorbonne, Beier returned to Ibadan with more ideas.
The first African literary journal in English, Black Orpheus quickly became the leading venue for publishing contemporary Nigerian authors.
Among the young writers involved with it in the exciting early years of Nigerian independence were Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.
He translated the plays of such Nigerian dramatists as Duro Ladipo and published Modern Poetry (1963), an anthology of African poems.
[7] In the early 1980s, Beier returned for a time to Germany, where he founded and directed the Iwalewa Haus, an art centre at the University of Bayreuth.
Ulli Beier makes a guest appearance in the novel Eteka: Rise of the Imamba in the Bandung chapter, as a mentor to the fictional character Oladele.