Ulla Lenze was born in Mönchengladbach in 1973. Her novels have received several awards, for her complete works she received the Literature Prize of the Cultural Circle of the German Economy in 2016 and the Lower Rhine Literature Prize in 2020.

At the age of sixteen, Ulla Lenze lived with a local family in Pune, India. She studied at the University of Cologne to become a philosophy teacher and completed her university studies with a thesis on Hegel's ‘Theory of Poetry’. Between 2009 and 2011, she lived in Bombay and Istanbul. In 2023 she was Max Kade Visiting Professor at Dartmouth (USA). Ulla Lenze now lives in Buckow, near Berlin. 

Her current novel Das Wohlbefinden (The Wellbeing) was a finalist for the German Book Prize 2024.

Since 2017, Ulla Lenze has been part of the literary project ‘Weiter Schreiben’ (Further Writing), which connects authors from crisis regions with German-speaking authors.