Urquhart has received several honorary doctorates from Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto, University of Western Ontario, and the Royal Military College. She has served on the Board of PEN Canada and on the Advisory Board for the Restoration of the Vimy Memorial, and on several international prize juries including that of the International Dublin IMPAC Award, the Giller Prize, The Governor Generals Award Fiction Jury, The Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, and the American International Neustadt Award. She has also been writer-in-residence at University of Toronto, University of Guelph, University of Ottawa, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and was appointed 2017-2018 Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin Ireland. She has taught creative writing at each of these institutions and is an adjunct professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.

Her most recent novel, The Night Stages, was released in 2015 by Farrar Straus Giroux in the USA, McClelland and Stewart in Canada, and Oneworld in the UK, and in translation elsewhere.

Jane Urquhart lives in Northumberland County, Ontario, with her husband, artist Tony Urquhart, and in the past three decades she has spent a portion of each year in Ireland.