Her most notable novel, Gardening at Night, won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book (Africa and the Caribbean), and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.

[2] She was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2014, and won the Short Story Day Africa competition the same year.

[4] Before this, she worked as a teacher of History at Cedar House; and of Narrative and Aesthetics at AFDA, the film school, both in Cape Town.

Her essays and short stories are published regularly and her work has been translated into German, Swedish, Mandarin and Russian.

Awerbuck also writes as "Frank Owen", a joint pseudonym used when collaborating with co-writer Alex Latimer.