What’s new?

I’m so pleased to be Consulting Literary Editor for Harper’s Bazaar; I write for the magazine every month, and blog for them here. I’m a Contributing Writer for The New Statesman, as well as writing for The Financial Times, The Economist, The New York Times… follow me @EricaWgnr where I’ll post links to my pieces! Meantime,  the show I’ve made, A Concert of Stories, with storyteller Abbi Patrix and percussionist Linda Edsjo is now part of the touring repertoire of Compagnie de Cercle — here are details about the show, and where to see it (mostly in France, and in French…). If you want to read about how it came about you can do that here. My novel, Seizure, is published in French now as La Coupure. If you’re heading that way… “Seizure is terrific.” Philip Pullman

Upcoming events

Good news! First Light, the book of essays I have edited or Unbound about the great Alan Garner — with contributions from Neil Gaiman,  Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry, Ali Smith, Rowan Williams and many others — is published in May. (Here’s a piece about it in the Guardian.) It looks just beautiful, and I’ll try to keep you up to date here with the events I’m doing to celebrate publication.

I’ll be at the Barnes Children’s Literature Festival in London on the evening of May 14th, talking about Alan Garner with illustrator Michael Foreman and First Light contributor Cornelia Funke.

June 2nd, I’ll be in Paris, at FEST — the Federation of European Storytelling — along with Abbi Patrix, French/Norwegian conteur extraordinaire; and we’ll be discussing reality and fiction in storytelling.

Poetry and Lyrics is a wonderful new festival at June 2016 King’s Place in London; I’ll be talking to singer and composer Chris Wood and storyteller Hugh Lupton about poetry and folk music on June 11 — see you there!

AND you are in plenty of time to buy your tickets for the wonderful Beyond the Border Storytelling Festival, 1-3 July 2016. I’m already packing my tent…

Quote of the day

• An eerie resonance - “Universal suffrage can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice — it means a European, and especially Celtic, proletariat on the Atlantic coast, an African proletariat on the shores of the Gulf [of Mexico], and a Chinese proletariat on the Pacific.” Boston’s Charles Francis Adams Jr., grandson of John Quincy Adams, in 1877. From Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics by Terry Golway