The pair will appear in conversation at The Coast Is Queer Festival 2026 on Sunday 18 October, in an event chaired by festival director Lesley Wood.
Sarah Waters has been one of the defining voices in British lesbian fiction of the past three decades. Her debut novel, Tipping the Velvet, published in 1998, was followed by Affinity, Fingersmith, The Night Watch, The Little Stranger and The Paying Guests. Her novels have brought lesbian lives and relationships into historical and contemporary fiction while attracting both critical acclaim and a wide mainstream readership.
Several of Waters’ novels have subsequently been adapted for stage and screen, including Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and The Night Watch. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2019.
Joining her is Julia Armfield, whose fiction takes queer relationships into stranger and more unsettling territory. Armfield’s debut novel, Our Wives Under The Sea, follows the relationship between two women after one returns from a disastrous deep-sea expedition. Blending love, grief, body horror and the uncanny, the novel won the Polari Prize in 2023.
Her second novel, Private Rites, continued her exploration of relationships, sexuality and environmental crisis, combining queer fiction with speculative and climate fiction. It was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2025.
The conversation will explore the connections between the two writers’ work, including the ways in which queer authors have increasingly been able to move beyond conventional literary categories.
Waters helped establish lesbian narratives within commercially successful historical and literary fiction. Armfield represents a later generation of writers for whom queer characters can inhabit stories involving horror, ecological collapse, speculative fiction and the surreal without their sexuality necessarily being the sole focus of the narrative.
The event promises a chance to look both backwards and forwards: at the writers and books that helped create space for contemporary queer fiction, and at the possibilities for where the literature might go next.
Details
In Conversation with Sarah Waters and Julia Armfield takes place at the Auditorium at The Attenborough Centre, University of Sussex.
Dates: Sunday 18 October at 5pm. The event lasts approximately 1 hour 15 minutes.
Venue: the Auditorium at The Attenborough Centre, University of Sussex.
Accessible:
Reserved seating for customers with access requirements
These seats are not on general online sale, but you can book them by indicating your access requirements on your account by joining the Access Register, or by contacting the box office directly at attenboroughcentre@sussex.ac.uk
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- Spaces for wheelchair users
- Seats with flat floor access
- Seats with best sightlines BSL interpretation or captioning (when applicable)
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