Erica Wagner’s Biography
Erica Wagner was born in New York City in 1967 and grew up on the Upper West Side. Her first job was helping her mother to answer all the fan mail for The Muppets; she can slit open one envelope and slip a picture of Miss Piggy into another like nobody’s business.
She moved to Britain in the 1980s to continue her education: first at St Paul’s Girls’ School, then at Cambridge, and finally at the University of East Anglia, where she was taught by the late Malcolm Bradbury and by Rose Tremain.
Erica now lives in London, where she works as Literary Editor of The Times, editing the Books section that appears every Saturday. She also reviews regularly for The New York Times, and appears frequently on radio and on television. Erica has published a number of books, including Gravity, Ariel’s Gift, and most recently, Seizure. She has judged many literary prizes, namely the Man Booker in 2002 (when the winner was Yann Martel’s Life of Pi), the Orange Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Forward Prize.
Erica is a fencer (epée), loves to cook, knit, sing and ride on her scooter (the push kind, not the motor kind). She loves to listen to stories as well as read them, and seeks out fine storytellers from all over the world.
She is married to the writer Francis Gilbert, with whom she has a son, Theodore.
To read more about Erica Wagner, visit www.ericawagner.co.uk
