Julia Armfield was born in London in 1990. She is a fiction writer and occasional playwright with a Masters in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. She was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2019. She was commended in the Moth Short Story Prize 2017, longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award 2018, and won the White Review Short Story Prize 2018. Her first book, salt slow, is a collection of short stories about bodies and the bodily, mapping the skin and bones of its characters through their experiences of isolation, obsession and love. She won the Pushcart Prize in 2020.
Praise for Private Rites: ‘It's a book of extraordinary sentences, set in end-times which feel bleakly real yet pulse with a tireless, tangible force of love’ Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From ‘Delivered with Julia Armfield’s signature cocktail of deadpan wit and staggering beauty… a sharply observed exploration of grief, family and the end of the world as we know it’ Alice Slater, author of Death of a Bookseller ‘A witty, brutal examination of the ways that the bonds of family can be strangulating, or transfigured by the painful pressure of intimacy into something devastatingly, unfairly tender; and one of the most brilliant, original visions of climate crisis Britain I have ever read. Private Rites has the elemental power of a thunderstorm and the thrilling emotional honesty of a first kiss. Julia Armfield is an era-defining writer’ Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time ‘The rain soaked world of Privates Rites is one you'll want to linger in: despite the creeping sense of dread, the characters and relationships Armfield has created are totally compelling. An astonishing ambitious novel that won't let you go.’ Sarvat Hasin, author of The Giant Dark Praise for Our Wives Under the Sea: ‘Deeply romantic and fabulously strange’ Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith ‘Julia Armfield is one of my favourite writers … A contemporary gothic fairy tale, sublime in its creepiness’ Florence Welch ‘Beautiful, otherworldly, like floating through water with your eyes open’ Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under