[1][2] Her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, written at the age of 24,[3] was published in 2004 and was shortlisted for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in 2005.

[12] In September 2012, in a ceremony in Cleveland, Ohio, Edugyan received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction for Half-Blood Blues, chosen by a jury composed of Rita Dove, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Joyce Carol Oates, Steven Pinker, and Simon Schama.

[13][14] In March 2014, Edugyan's first work of non-fiction, Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home, was published by the University of Alberta Press[15] in the Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Series.

[19] It won the Giller Prize in November 2018,[20] making Edugyan only the third writer, after M. G. Vassanji and Alice Munro, ever to win the award twice.

[27] She features in Margaret Busby's 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa with the contribution "The Wrong Door: Some Meditations on Solitude and Writing".

Edugyan was selected as chair for the 2023 Booker Prize jury, alongside fellow judges Robert Webb, Mary Jean Chan, Adjoa Andoh and James Shapiro.