Edemariam was born to an Ethiopian father and a Canadian mother. She grew up in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. She studied English literature at Oxford University and the University of Toronto.[5]
In 2014 her then forthcoming memoir, The Wife's Tale: A Personal History[6] – the story of Edemariam's Ethiopian grandmother, Yetemegnu[7] – was awarded the Royal Society of Literature's Jerwood Award for a non-fiction work in progress.[8][1]
Informed by the author's 70 hours of interviews and conversations in Amharic with Yetemegnu,[9] The Wife's Tale received favourable critical on its publication in February 2018 by Fourth Estate/HarperCollins,[10][11] with the reviewer for The Times finding it "enriching",[12] and Lucy Hughes-Hallett writing in the New Statesman: "To read The Wife's Tale is not just to hear about times past and (for a western reader) far away, but to be transported into them."[13] Nadifa Mohamed's review in The Guardian praised the book as "a loving portrait of a grandmother, undiminished by the distances between the author and her subject",[14] and Nilanjana Roy in The Financial Times described it as an "outstanding and unusual memoir" in which Edemariam traces a century of Ethiopian history through the life of her nonagenarian grandmother.[15] In The Observer, Arifa Akbar noted: "What brings this narrative flaring to life, though, is not the rigour of its research but its imagination and novelistic tone; Edemariam's prose climbs inside Yetemegnu's memories to inhabit them and bring her solidly, vividly, to life."[16] Selecting The Wife's Tale as one of "the best books by African writers in 2019", Samira Sawlani on African Arguments concluded: "Aida Edemariam has gifted the world a priceless insight into history through her grandmother's eyes."[17]
Edemariam was awarded the Ondaatje Prize for The Wife's Tale in May 2019.[18][19]
She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.[20]
