2026-07-22
26 分钟Hello and welcome to Meet the Writers, I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest today has spent much of her working life thinking about how other people's stories are told.
Born in New York and now based in London, she was literary editor of The Times for nearly two decades,
interviewing writers including Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
while building a body of work of her own, spanning fiction, criticism and biography.
Her books include Ariel's Gift, about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath,
and Chief Engineer, her biography of Washington Roebling, the man who oversaw the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Her latest book returns to Roebling once again, but this time through fiction.
Wash explores the private life behind the public achievement, moving through love, trauma, ambition
and illness to ask what history leaves out and whether fiction can reach emotional truths, the archive.
Cannot.
Erica Wagner, welcome to Meet the Writers.
I'm so delighted to be here.
Thank you.
Now, you were born in New York.
You moved to Britain as a teenager.
So tell me about that dislocation.
A lot of writers I speak to start from the fact that there was some kind of, well, dislocation in their childhood.
Yes, I grew up very much a New Yorker, but my mother, my late mother, was a passionate Anglophile.
So we came to this country and travelled all over England, Scotland, Wales.