In Conversation with Sarah Waters and Julia Armfield

Join us for a landmark event bringing together two generation-defining authors to discuss the evolution, lineage, and future of queer literature.

Over the last three decades, Sarah Waters has fundamentally reshaped the literary landscape. From her groundbreaking debut Tipping the Velvet to works like Fingersmith and The Paying Guests, Sarah’s work carved out a vital space for queer narratives in mainstream fiction. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an OBE recipient, her multi-award-winning novels proved that explicitly queer stories could be historical, commercial, and critically formidable.

By pushing open those doors, Sarah paved the way for a new generation of writers to subvert genre boundaries — including one of contemporary fiction’s brightest stars, Julia Armfield. Julia’s Polari Prize-winning debut novel Our Wives Under The Sea and her acclaimed follow-up Private Rites (shortlisted for the 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Award) seamlessly blend queer romance with elements of body horror, the uncanny, and speculative fiction.

Sarah and Julia will trace the lineage between their works. They will explore how the foundation built by foundational queer texts has allowed a new generation of writers to lean into genre-bending, eco-horror, and the surreal, discussing what it means to write queer literature today and where the stories are headed next.

Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She is the author of six novels –  Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith, The Night Watch, The Little Stranger and The Paying Guests – most of which have been adapted for stage, television or feature film. Her books have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and she has won a Betty Trask Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the South Bank Show Award for Literature, and a CWA Historical Dagger. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2019 she was awarded an OBE for services to literature.

Julia Armfield is a fiction writer, living in London with her wife and cat. 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. Her second novel, Private Rites, was longlisted for the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize and shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award 2025.