Erica Wagner is the author of Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge (Bloomsbury, 2017). Her other books are Gravity: Stories (Granta, 1997), Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters (Faber & Faber/W.W. Norton, 2000), and the novel, Seizure (Faber & Faber/W.W. Norton, 2007). Her work has appeared in the online journal Boundless; her poetry has been published by PNReview and the Times Literary Supplement. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, the Economist, the Financial Times, and the New York Times, among others. She is the editor of First Light: A Celebration of the Work of Alan Garner, published by Unbound in 2016. With storyteller Abbi Patrix and musician Linda Edsjö, she created the show Pas de Deux/A Concert of Stories, which premiered in 2011 and continues to tour around the world. She was the recipient of the Eccles British Library Writer’s Award in 2014 and is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and consulting literary editor for Harper’s Bazaar. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.  

Photo by Olivia Beasley