In Conversation: Julia Armfield and Justin Torres (BSL Interpreted)

This event will have a BSL interpreter 

Inheritance, the slow obliteration of any firm idea of reality, being one thing on the surface and another thing underneath (so often central to the queer experience) – these themes are elegantly explored in Blackouts, Justin Torres’ haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure, and in Private Rites, Julia Armfield’s exquisitely drawn dystopian vision of the future.

Justin won America’s National Book Award for Blackouts in 2024. Julia’s debut novel Our Wives Under The Sea won the 2023 UK Polari Award. We are delighted to bring these award-winning, audacious, intellectually daring writers together, on stage in conversation, for the first time.

Julia Armfield is a fiction writer, living in London with her girlfriend who is fine and their cat who is garbage.Her work has been published in Granta, The White Review and Best British Short Stories 2019 and 2021. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. She was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award 2018, and won the White Review Short Story Prize 2018 and a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She is the author of salt slow, a collection of short stories, which was longlisted for the Polari Prize 2020 and the Edge Hill Prize 2020. Her debut novel, Our Wives Under The Sea, was shortlisted for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award 2022 and won the Polari Prize 2023.

Justin Torres is the author of Blackouts, which won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lambda Literary award, and the Southern California Book Award. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, he’s also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His first novel, We the Animals was a national bestseller and adapted into a feature film. He lives Los Angeles, and is an associate professor of English at UCLA.