BIO
Natasha Brown is an author of literary fiction. Born in London in 1990, she was raised by Jamaican parents who held a strong passion for literature and encouraged her to start reading from a young age. After reading Mathematics at Cambridge University, she spent a decade working in the financial sector in the city of London. In 2019, alongside her full-time career, she began the creative process of writing about the intricacies of language and rhetoric. This would later result in her winning the London Writers Award for literary fiction, and the publication of her critically acclaimed debut novel Assembly (2021).
Brown often addressed the important of literature in posing critical questions regarding the state of society and related social relations. Her writing is characterised by experimental and lyrical accounts of experiences of racialisation and classism in contemporary British society, whereby the ideological complexity of language is placed centre stage.
In 2021, the author published her debut novel Assembly. This relatively short work, which transcends various genre boundaries in its exploration of the struggles of an unnamed young black woman who navigates her racialised and gendered position in a financial firm in London and in her relationship with her white British partner. The novel’s fragmented plot leads up to a lavish but uncomfortable garden party at the estate of her family-in-law. Alongside metanarrative comments, poetic forms and a deleted tweet, the book features intertextual references to various literary figures such as Claudia Rankine, William Morris, Audre Lorde, bell hooks and Virginia Woolf. In interviews, Brown explains that “the story of dissatisfaction” in Assembly nuances the popular “genre of the strong Black millennial woman” (Brown interviewed by Tsjeng 2021). She depicts the protagonist’s disillusionment with the traditional narrative of social mobility, which assumes that “meritocracy as a metric affords her opportunities that ‘race’ would have disqualified her from” (Brown interviewed by Deleva 2021). Since its publication and subsequent success, Assembly has been translated into a wide range of languages, and was nominated for various prizes, including the Rathbones Folio Prize and Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2022.
Her second novel, Universality, will be published in the spring of 2025. This work will explore the connections between truth, class and power through the eyes of a familiar character from her previous work. (CG/KvdB)
Selected Prizes and Nominations
• London Writers Award 2019
• Betty Trask award 2021
• Observer’s Best Debut Novelists 2021
• Women’s Prize Futures Award 2021
• The Goldsmiths Prize 2021
• Desmond Elliott Prize 2022
• Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022
• Rathbones Folio Prize 2022
• The Writer’s Prize 2022
• Best of Young British Novelists 2023
Bibliography
Baptiste, Desiree. “Nothing is Impossible: ‘Black Alice’ Traverses an All-Too-Racist Wonderland.” Times Literary Supplement, vol. 6172, 2021: pp. 17-18.
Becker, Katrin. “Narrating Class and Classlessness in Contemporary British Novels of Black Women’s Social Climbing.” Re-Imagining Class: Intersectional Perspectives on Class Identity and Precarity in Contemporary Culture, edited by Michiel Rys and Liesbeth François, Leuven University Press, 2024, pp. 181-200.
Biggs, Joanna. “Pure, Fucking Profit.” Rev. of Assembly, by Natasha Brown, London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 14, 2021: n.p.
Brown, Natasha. Assembly. Hamish Hamilton, 2021.
—. “Author Natasha Brown on Writing the Debut Novel of the Summer.” Interview with Zing Tsjeng, Vogue, 18 May 2021.
—. “Breakfast with... Natasha Brown.” Interview with Jo Rodgers, Toast Magazine, 23 August 2021.
—. “I’m Interested in Whether Language Can Be Neutral”’. Women’s Prize for Fiction Online, 28 Jan. 2022.
—. “Natasha Brown: “It’s Important to Celebrate Difficult Novels.” Interview with Leo Robson, The New Statesman, 10 Nov 2021.
—. “Universality.” Granta, 27 April 2023.
—. “Writing With Fewer Limitations: The Millions Interviews Natasha Brown.” Interview with Martha Anne Toll, The Millions, 27 January 2022.
—. “‘Shorter is expected to be less substantial. It feels arbitrary—why would length be correlated with impact?’ A conversation with Natasha Brown.” Q&A, Five Dials, Less is More, 2021, pp. 42-53.
Brown, Natasha and Bulley, Victoria Adukwei. “In Conversation: Natasha Brown and Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Granta, 11 June 2021.
Collins, Sara. “Assembly by Natasha Brown Review – A Modern Mrs Dalloway.” Rev. of Assembly, by Natasha Brown, The Guardian, 21 June 2021.
Garber, Megan. “The Great Novel of the Internet Was Published in 1925.” The Atlantic, 8 Oct 2021.
Gerritsen, Carmijn. “(Re)Imagining Black Britishness: Identity Politics, Belonging and Celebration in A Portable Paradise and Assembly.” Frame Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2024: pp. 77-90.
Gilbert, Jay. “Ill Behaviour: Assembly by Natasha Brown.” Rev. of Assembly, by Natasha Brown, Literary Review, vol. 497, 2021: n.p.
Gyarkye, Lovia. “A Black Woman in Finance Regains Her Agency.” Rev. of Assembly, by Natasha Brown, The New York Times, 13 Sept 2021.
Keane, Alice D. “Virginia Woolf, Race, and “Restorying” in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, vol. 101, 2023: pp. 20-23.
Khanom, Shabnom. “Assembly by Natasha brown Review – Privilege, Prejudice and Money.” Rev. of Assembly, by Natasha Brown, The Times, 25 July 2021.
Pittel, Harald. “No More Playing in the Dark: Assembly by Natasha Brown.” Hard Times Literature, vol. 105, 2021: pp. 90-98.
Self, J. "Contemporary Writing with a Twist and a Tug." The Critic Magazine, 27 June 2021.
Spalding-Mulcock, Paul. ‘“Why Endure My Own Dehumanization?”: Assembly by Natasha Brown." Rev. of Assembly, by Natasha Brown, Yorkshire Times, 2021.
Williams, Holly. “Assembly by Natasha Brown Review – The Grind of Everyday Prejudice.” Rev. of Assembly, by Natasha Brown, The Guardian, 31 May 2021.
