Aida Edemariam

Educated at the universities of Oxford, McGill, and Toronto, Aida Edemariam began her journalism career at Harper’s Magazine, New York. She is now a senior feature writer and editor at the Guardian, and has written book reviews, leaders, and long reads on everything from the academic novel to the tar sands of northern Canada and the UK’s hostile environment, as well as major interviews with subjects ranging from Alice Munro, Hilary Mantel and Jorie Graham to Ehud Barak and John Kerry. She has also edited the Saturday features section. 

Her first book The Wife’s Tale, “an exceptional biography” (Richard Holmes), was published in the US, Canada and the UK. It was widely and positively reviewed in publications from the New Yorker to the Financial Times, and chosen as an Economist, CBC, and Little Atoms Book of the Year. The Wife’s Tale won a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for a work of non-fiction in progress and the 2019 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. It was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award in Canada and an Arts Futures Award in the UK, and has been required reading on courses at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Newcastle University’s MA in creative writing, and the Life-Writing MA at Wolfson College, Oxford. Aida is a panel tutor in creative writing at the University of Cambridge. 

Aida has been a judge on the International Booker Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature, the RSL Giles St Aubyn Award for Non-fiction, the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the Society of Authors Travelling Scholarships, and the 2024 Press Awards. She has also worked as a translator from Amharic.

Born to Ethiopian and Canadian parents in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she grew up, Aida has lived in Montreal, Sussex, Toronto, New York, Belfast, York, and London. She now lives in Oxford.