Julia Armfield wins Polari Prize 2023

The Polari Prize celebrates LGBTQ+ stories that entertain, enrich, and inspire, and is the only dedicated LGBTQ+ book prize in the UK. Julia later joked on X: “I blacked out when giving a speech and apparently announced my holiday plans to the room!”

Her novel tells the story of Leah, who unexpectedly returns from a disastrous deep-sea dive, and her wife, Miri, who grapples with the ways Leah changed while under water. By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is a genre-bending exploration of the depths of love and grief at the heart of a marriage.

The novel “opens up what we believe is possible from queer writing,” said judge Joelle Taylor. “It is a strange, speculative, poetic and thrilling novel - a heart turner as much as a page turner.”

Julia is a fiction writer and occasional playwright with a Master’s in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. Her second novel, Private Rites, which follows three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world, was acquired by Fourth Estate in September.

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.

Many congratulations to Julia from all of us at LEH.