Julia Armfield

Julia Armfield is a British novelist and short story writer born in 1991 in London. She studied English at Manchester and has worked as an editor and arts writer. Her debut story collection salt slow (2019) was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize and was widely acclaimed for its feminist body horror and mythological imagination. Our Wives Under the Sea (2022, Picador) is her debut novel, a story of two women — Miri and Leila — whose relationship is strained after Leila returns from a deep-sea research expedition profoundly changed, in a slow-burn of body horror and grief. It won the Polari Prize for Book of the Year in 2023, the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, and multiple other prizes. The novel was celebrated for its queer love story and its visceral evocation of the abyssal sea as metaphor for loss and alienation. Armfield is one of the most celebrated voices of the new generation of British horror-adjacent literary fiction writers. She has spoken widely about horror as a feminist form.