Natasha Brown: Universality

Remember – words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency.

Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, a man is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar. A plucky young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement. She solves the mystery, but her viral longread exposé raises more questions than it answers.

Natasha Brown (UK) appears in Aotearoa for the first time to discuss her latest satirical novel Universality, a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power. Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, and told through a voyeuristic lens, Universality focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean. Brown’s debut novel Assembly won a Betty Trask Award (2020) and was translated into 17 languages. Natasha will be in conversation with Pip Adam.