Julia Armfield Shortlisted for Top Literary Award

Her novel Our Wives Under The Sea is described as “a deep sea love story". The organisers of the only dedicated LGBTQ+ book prize in the UK said the shortlist features: “queer utopias, impassioned memoir and exquisite prose”.

The winner of the Polari Prize, which is sponsored by DHH Literary Agency, will be announced in a ceremony at the British Library on November 24th. 

By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Julia’s novel Our Wives Under the Sea is a genre-bending exploration of the depths of love and grief at the heart of a marriage.

Julia is a fiction writer and occasional playwright with a Master’s in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. Her work has been published in The White Review, Lighthouse, Analog Magazine, Neon Magazine and The Stockholm Review. She was commended in the Moth Short Story Prize 2017 and won the White Review Short Story Prize in 2018.

Chris Gribble, Polari Book Prize judge, said: “This year’s Polari Prize shortlist lays out the joys, challenges, and complexities of contemporary and historical LGBTQ+ lives in a brilliant array of fiction and non-fiction that will leave no one in any doubt that our stories are worthy of their places on every bookshelf and in every library.  These writers are working at the peak of their powers, and if you haven’t read their work yet, you have a real treat in store.”

We are all rooting for you, Julia, and sending lots of LEH luck for the announcement next month.