Erica Wwagner was born in New York in 1967. She moved to the UK in 1986 and studied at the Universities of Cambridge and East Anglia. Her short stories have been widely anthologized and have been broadcast on the radio. Granta Books published Gravity, her first collection, in 1997, and since then Wagner has published Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of 'Birthday Letters' and Seizure, her debut novel. She is the Literary Editor of The Times and lives in London.