Erica Wagner

I’m in @obsnewreview today writing about what it means to write fiction — when you have already written non-fiction about the “same” subject. If you know anyone else who’s tried this, let me know… so far I seem to be alone! Dear Wash, thanks for your companionship all these years…. Out tomorrow from @saltpublishing Link to piece in bio.

Just because ❤️

There is the joy of publishing the novel that has meant so much to you……. And then there is…. TOP GUN @topgunmovie 😊😊😊

Nothing like actual newsprint! Thank you 🙏 😊 to @ft_weekend for this amazing review of Wash, out from @saltpublishing on Monday! 📚 …and a little glimpse down in the caisson of the Brooklyn Bridge , 1869 drawing by Wash himself, from NYC’s Municipal Archives. Read Wash and follow him down to the depths…!

The Observer Book Club with Erica Wagner Erica Wagner Consulting Editor Tom Gatti Literary Editor Join the Observer Book Club for an evening with Erica Wagner, discussing her acclaimed new novel Wash, in conversation with Tom Gatti. At the centre of Wash is Washington Roebling, the man who oversaw the creation of the Brooklyn Bridge - but Wagner’s novel is less a historical reconstruction than an intimate act of imagination. Moving through memory rather than chronology, it traces a life shaped by a brutal father, war, illness and a great love, asking what it means to spend your life fulfilling a dream that was never entirely your own. Never more poignantly told, Wash is a richly layered portrait of ambition, marriage and inheritance, and of the emotional cost behind one of the modern world’s great engineering feats. Wagner will discuss the decades-long fascination that led her to Roebling’s story, the relationship between fact and fiction, and how the lives we live are shaped as much by longing as by history. Thursday, 4 June 2026 18:30 - 19:30 22 Berners Street #Wash #EricaWagner #ObserverBookClub #TheObserver #TomGatti #BookEvent #LondonLiteraryEvents #AuthorTalk #InConversation

In @natlivingstone ’s “The Nuremberg Women” she reveals the hidden figures behind the trial of the century. In London’s Imperial War Museum hangs an evocative painting, The Nuremberg Trial, 1946, which shows the accused sitting in rows, military police behind them and judges in front; the realism of the painting dissolves at its edges, where the walls of the chamber vanish to reveal the ruins of the war, the bodies of the dead. Not a single woman is depicted. But the painting itself is by Laura Knight, one of the most renowned artists of her era and one of eight women whose contributions to these historic trials Natalie Livingstone delineates in her fascinating and important book. While one could not say that in every case their work or their lives have gone unrecognised – besides Knight she includes Rebecca West and Erika Mann – taken in aggregate, Livingstone builds a vivid picture of the hidden figures behind this unprecedented endeavour. Read more at our link in bio as @ericawgnr discusses the new book. Photograph by United States Holocaust Museum Collection/Gift of Mary DeForest

And so it was that the fabulous @tahmima stopped by @theobserveruk towers to talk about her astonishing new book Uprising coming from @canongatebooks — “Through her unwaveringly political and unflinchingly forthright novel, Anam shows the power of rage and radical hope”, wrote Sana Goyal in the Guardian. I was so happy to be able to cheer for her and you know? for BOTH our new books — cuz writing is damn hard work and we need all the joy we can get. I’d just heard that the FT thought my novel Wash published by @saltpublishing was “closely observed, achingly felt, like still lives that aren’t still” so my grin is extra wide. Here’s to boon companions along the road. To courage. To the building of bridges. On we go!

Absolutely over the moon with this review of my novel Wash by John Sedgwick in @financialtimes — “The effect, ultimately, is to create the past the way memory does, but with far more clarity. Readers enter her fiction physically, as it is so solid and majestic, rather like the great bridge itself.” The greatest gift a writer can get is to feel the reader understands what her aim was — so this piece is a true gift — and how I love being with @saltpublishing my WONDERFUL publishers! 😊😊😊 Link to piece in bio…

@ericawgnr : '3 February 1981: @sirihustvedt , a few days past her 26th birthday, attends the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan to hear the poet Ann Lauterbach read. Walking out of the theatre into the lobby with a friend, she later recalls: “I saw a beautiful man in a black leather jacket, his shoulders hunched, his expression inward, standing near the exit to the street. In memory, he has a cigar or a cigarette between his fingers. I can’t remember which. My attraction to him felt like a blow to the back of my neck.” 'Luckily, Siri’s friend knew the beautiful man and could introduce them – he was Paul, eight years older, and, like the smitten Siri, at the outset of a quest to make a way in the world as a writer. “Later, Paul told me he had no idea what to make of the tall blonde in a jumpsuit, not at first, anyway.” In her beautiful memoir, Ghost Stories, Siri Hustvedt shares these shards of recollection as she reckons with the loss of her beloved husband, Paul Auster, who died following complications from lung cancer in the spring of 2024 at the age of 77. 'A third of the way through this book – which is something of a diary, something of a meditation, something that allows a glimpse of Auster’s final and most personal work – Hustvedt gives the reader a moment that seems to turn back time, and not just because of the jumpsuit (“a gift from my ex-boyfriend – I felt chic in it”) or the huddled shared cab ride downtown to another party. Her impressions are fresh and precise yet utterly fragmented: she shows what it means when one half of a shared memory is devoured by death’s maw. “I don’t remember whose party. Grace Glueck pops into my head, but I could be wrong. Paul would have remembered.” There is nothing that feels retrospective in the conjuring of two young people on the cusp of who they would become. Fresh too is the raw sorrow of the widow as time switchbacks on itself, the present intruding into the bliss of the past.' Read the full review on our website - link in bio ✍️ @ericawgnr 📸 @sirihustvedt Ghost Stories: A Memoir is published by @sceptrebooks (£22). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £19.80 (10% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

A little Sunday enticement from the opening chapter of Wash, published on May 18 by @saltpublishing ! You know how wonderful it is for authors if you pre-order, right? 😊 And many thanks to my stellar videographer @theo_wagster ❤️

What a gorgeous evening with these gorgeous authors! @lyse.doucet and Jane Rogoyska @janerska and Rozie Kelly @rozeamee — shortlisted for the @womensprize for The Finest Hotel in Kabul, Hotel Exile and Kingfisher. A joy to talk fiction and nonfiction at @theobserveruk towers on a Wednesday night! The kind of hour that reminds me how lucky I am to meet such brilliant folks and talk about the work we love and cherish. We look pretty happy, don’t we?

Thrilled to be on the @scrivenerapp podcast taking about making work! Thanks to Kirk McElhearn for such a great interview. Anyone who has been taught by me certainly knows how much I love Scrivener… the great @lee_minjin first recommended it to me and I have never looked back. Wash and the two books before all came together on Scrivener and I am eternally grateful! Link to the pod in bio…