Ariel's Gift - Tapa blanda

Erica Wagner provides a comprehensive guide to the poems that must constitute one of the most extraordinary and powerful volumes published in the last century. When Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters was published in 1998, it was greeted with astonishment and acclaim. Few suspected that Ted Hughes had been at work, for a quarter of a century, on a cycle of poems addressed almost entirely to his first wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath. In Ariel's Gift, Erica Wagner offers a commentary on the poems, pointing the reader towards the events that shaped them, and, crucially, showing how they draw upon Plath's own work.

Erica Wagner was born in New York City in 1967. She moved to Britain in the 1980s and now lives in London, where she works as Literary Editor of The Times. In 1997 she published a book of short stories, Gravity (Granta), and three years later, following the publication of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, a biographical gloss on that book, Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters (Faber & Faber). Her stories have been widely anthologised and been broadcast on the radio; her poems have appeared in The TLS and PNReview. She now edits the Books section that appears every Saturday in The Times, and writes a weekly column in that section, as well as reviews and articles. She's interviewed such writers as Seamus Heaney, Donna Tartt, Maurice Sendak, Philip Pullman, Gitta Sereny, Paul Auster, Alan Garner, Peter Ackroyd, Bill Bryson and Nick Hornby. She reviews regularly for The New York Times, and also appears frequently on the radio and on television. She has been a guest on such programmes as Today, Front Row, The Culture Show, and (in the USA) Charlie Rose and Larry King Live. She has judged many literary prizes; 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. She sits on the Executive Committee of PEN. Erica is a fencer (epee), 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 deeply attached to the Brooklyn Bridge, and often travels back to New York to cross the East River on its span. She is married to the writer Francis Gilbert, author of I'm a Teacher, Get Me Out of Here!, Teacher on the Run and Yob Nation. They have a son, Theodore.