Julia Armfield is a fiction writer, living in London. 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 won the White Review Short Story Prize 2018 and a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She is the author of Salt Slow (Picador, 2019), 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 (Picador, 2022), was shortlisted for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award 2022 and won the Polari Prize 2023. Her second novel, Private Rites (Fourth Estate, 2024), was longlisted for the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize in 2024 and shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2025.
Uncovering your Story – Queer Fiction
Are you a queer creative, looking for time and space to dedicate to your fiction? Do you have a novel or short story collection on queer themes that you want to push to the next level?
Whether you’re part way through a draft or ready to begin editing, experienced writers and tutors Leone Ross and Julia Armfield will give you the tools to polish your draft. Learn techniques for mining and conveying your stories and characters, gain crucial plot and structure advice, as well as editing techniques. This course is designed to elevate your writing at both a narrative and sentence level. Build your confidence and make connections with writers at a similar stage in their writing project.
You will receive one-to-one advice on your work, as well as collaborative workshop tuition, all designed to create a safe and supportive environment in which to really get to grips with those stories. The tutors will require a writing sample and a synopsis before the course – more details will be sent to participants nearer the time.
Tutors
Julia Armfield
Leone Ross
Leone Ross is a three-time novelist, short story writer and editor. Her fiction has been nominated for the Women’s Prize, the Goldsmiths award, the RSL Ondaatje award, and the Edge Hill Prize, among others. In 2022, she won the Manchester Prize for Fiction for a single short story. The Guardian has praised her “searing empathy” and The Times Literary Supplement called her “a pointilliste, a master of detail...”. Ross has taught creative writing for 20 years and worked as a journalist throughout the 90s. Her third novel, This One Sky Day aka Popisho (Faber and Faber) was published in 2021. She is the editor of Glimpse: A Black British Anthology of Speculative Fiction, published in 2022 (Peepal Tree Press).
Guest Reader
Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She is the author of six novels – Tipping the Velvet (Virago, 1998), Affinity (Virago, 1999), Fingersmith (Little Brown, 2002), The Night Watch (Little Brown, 2006), The Little Stranger (Little Brown, 2009) and The Paying Guests (Little Brown, 2014) – 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.