After the successful completion of her studies in 1994, with a production of Béla Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle in her parish church and in the Kunsthaus Tacheles, she spent some time at first as an assistant director at the opera house in Graz, where in 1997 she did her own productions of Schoenberg's Erwartung, Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and a world premiere of her own piece Cats Have Seven Lives.

In 2015, the English translation of her novel Aller Tage Abend (The End of Days) won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

In September 2023, the English translation of Kairos by Michael Hofmann was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature[7] In 2024, Erpenbeck became the first German writer to win the International Booker Prize for Kairos, which is also the first novel originally written in German to win the award.

[8][9] "Thirty years have passed since the country in which I was born is gone, so I could dare to look back and take my time to carefully research what I lived through without really being aware of it," she said.

[10] Erpenbeck's works have been translated into Danish, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Dutch, Swedish, Slovene, Spanish, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Arabic, Estonian, Turkish, Croatian and Finnish.