Julia Armfield Reimagines King Lear in a Drowning World

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How does Shakespeare’s King Lear resonate in a world facing climate catastrophe? Novelist Julia Armfield explores this question in Private Rites, a novel set in a near-future London reshaped by rising sea levels. Following three sisters grappling with their father’s death, Private Rites weaves together themes of inheritance, power, and familial wounds—echoing Shakespeare’s tragic monarch while carving out a distinctly modern, queer perspective. Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea, discusses her fascination with disaster narratives, the inescapable dynamics of sibling relationships, and how Shakespeare’s work inspires her storytelling. From the storm in King Lear to the watery depths of her fiction, she reflects on how queerness, horror, and the climate crisis intersect in 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 in 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 in 2018 and won the White Review Short Story Prize in 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 in 2020 and the Edge Hill Prize in 2020. Her debut novel, Our Wives Under The Sea, was shortlisted for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2022 and won the Polari Prize in 2023. Her second novel, Private Rites, was longlisted for the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize in 2024. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published March 11, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:07.6	I'm Farah Kareem Cooper, the Folger director.
0:12.6	In her novel, Private Rights, the writer Julia Armfield imagines a near future
0:18.9	in which sea level rise and constant rains have inundated some of the world's largest cities. London is an archipelago, connected by ferries and intermittent bus service. The wealthy live in high rises or on hillsides. The poor barricade themselves as best they can. In this world,
0:41.4	three sisters reckon with the death of their father, a famous architect. He'd been imperious
0:47.7	and abusive, so their reactions have less to do with grief than with figuring out how to move forward.
0:55.7	As you may have guessed, the parallels to King Lear run deep.
1:00.7	Private Wrights is Armfield's second novel.
1:03.6	Her first, Our Wives Under the Sea, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
1:09.1	and received the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror and Best Debutteauvel.
1:15.9	It was named one of the best books of the year by NPR and The Washington Post.
1:22.5	Here's Julia Armfield in conversation with Barbara Bogave.
1:27.5	You clearly get what siblings, or maybe especially sisters, are like. But was the jumping
1:34.3	off point for this book Sisters or Lear or just living as we all do on the knife edge of
1:39.9	environmental catastrophe? Oh, man. That's a very good question. I think it was actually probably
1:47.3	sisters for me. I think I wanted to write about sisters. I always, I love to write about siblings.
1:54.1	I'm fascinated by the curious trap of the nuclear family and the patterns that people get stuck in
2:00.3	and the damage that people continue to do
2:03.7	to one another, often really without any sense of control over themselves as they do it. So I think
2:09.3	I wanted to write about siblings and sisters, and I wanted to write about three sisters,
2:14.0	particularly because that would allow me to tackle something, which I'm really
2:18.5	fascinated in, which is birth order. I always say that I don't believe in star signs. I don't believe in
	...

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