International Writers' Stage: Natasha Brown (UK) in Conversation with Lucia Odoom

Natasha Brown took both readers and critics by storm in 2021 with her debut novel Assembly, establishing herself as a writer of precise and elegant prose. Since then, her second novel, Universality, has been longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize, for which she is serving as chair of the judging panel this year.

After the event, Natasha Brown will be signing books. You can purchase the Danish version of "Universality" from our webshop here.

Complex novels with seriousness and humour

Assembly has been compared to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway: a story about the narratives we live with - those of race and class, security and freedom, winners and losers. In Assembly, a Black British woman prepares for a garden party at her boyfriend’s wealthy parents’ home. And where the first novel ends with a party, the second begins with one. Universality centres on a group of climate activists throwing a party in Yorkshire. But the party ends abruptly when a man is brutally struck down with a gold bar.

At once deeply serious and genuinely humorous, Universality demonstrates Natasha Brown’s masterful ability to write complex, multi-voiced novels in sharp and precise prose.

Reader and writer meet in prejudice

When Natasha Brown appears at International Authors' Stage, the conversation will focus on how she explores the relationship between reader and writer - and the prejudices and interpretations we carry with us. Brown sketches the outlines of her characters while withholding any superfluous information that might reveal her own judgement of them.

She describes this as a break with fiction’s tendency to guide the reader towards a fixed truth. Instead, Brown explores the neutrality of language and describes her books as an interactive experience between reader and writer.

Participants

Natasha Brown

Natasha Brown (b. 1990) is a British author. She grew up in London and studied mathematics at University of Cambridge. She later worked in the financial sector. In 2021, she made her debut with the novel Assembly, and most recently her novel Universality has been published in Danish.

Lucia Odoom

Lucia Odoom (b. 1987) is a writer, critic and cultural journalist at Politiken, where she writes and speaks about literature, film, television series and music. Her work explores the intersection between the personal and the political, and her writing revolves around love, migration, technology and relationships in a globalised world. Most recently, she published the novel Cosmos in 2024, which will be published in English in 2026.