Life and career
Armfield was born on 26 July 1990 [1] in London [2] and raised in Cobham, Surrey. Her mother was a stage manager and her father worked in London. Her brother Nicholas Armfield is an actor at the Royal Shakespeare Company. [3]
Armfield earned a master's degree in Victorian art and literature from Royal Holloway, University of London. [2] [4] Her thesis was on "teeth, hair, and nails in the Victorian imagination." [3] [4] She has cited H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King as influences. [5]
After attending a Curtis Brown creative writing course, [6] Armfield began writing short stories while working as an education manager at Inner Temple. After being shortlisted for the Deborah Rogers prize, her short story "The Great Awake" won the White Review prize in 2018. [3] Her first collection of short stories, Salt Slow, was published in 2019. It featured "The Great Awake", as well as eight other horror stories with a repeated focus on female adolescence as body horror. [5]
Our Wives Under the Sea , Armfield's debut novel, was published in 2022. It follows Miri and her wife Leah, a marine biologist who displays strange symptoms after returning from a deep sea exploration. [7] The novel won the Polari Prize and was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. [8]
Armfield's second novel Private Rites is loosely based on King Lear . It follows three sisters struggling to cope with their father's death amidst a climate crisis characterized by constantly rising flood waters. [9] The Guardian called the novel "brilliantly audacious", praising how "it never commits to an apocalyptic vision, even as the world it depicts becomes cartoonishly apocalyptic." [10]
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