Erica Wagner

Many in the literary world get their first job making the coffee at an agency, publication or indeed, an actual coffee shop, but Wagner’s first ‘job’ was helping her mother answer all the fan mail for The Muppets. Leaving the stack of signed Miss Piggy photos behind her, she moved from the United States to England in the 1980s where she obtained her BA from Cambridge and her MA from the University of East Anglia, where she was taught by Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. She is the author of several books, including a collection of short stories, Gravity, Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, the novel Seizure and a biography of Washington Roebling, the engineer who constructed the Brooklyn Bridge. Wagner was literary editor of The Times from 1996-2013. She also reviews regularly for The New York Times and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, in London.