Universality: Natasha Brown in conversation with Maxine Beneba Clarke

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. 

Through a voyeuristic lens, Universality focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean. The follow-up novel to Natasha Brown’s Assembly is a compellingly nasty celebration of the spectacular force of language. It dares you to look away.  

Natasha Brown

Assembly, published in 2021, was also shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, the Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for political fiction, and has been translated into 17 languages. Her second novel, Universality, is an Orwell Prize finalist and was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025. Before writing her novels, she read Mathematics at Cambridge University and spent over a decade working in the financial services industry. She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2023 and one of the Observer’s Best Debut Novelists in 2021. She has been described as ‘one of the most intelligent voices writing today’ by the Guardian and as ‘a powerful new voice in British literature’ by the Sunday Times. She is the Chair of judges for the International Booker Prize 2026. 

Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of over fourteen books for adults and children, including the ABIA and Indie award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the critically acclaimed bestselling memoir The Hate Race, the self-illustrated picture book When We Say Black Lives Matter, which was longlisted for the UK’s Kate Greenaway medal, and the CBCA Honour Book The Patchwork Bike (illustrated by Van T Rudd), which won the 2019 Boston Globe Horn Prize for Best Picture Book. Her poetry collections include Carrying the World, which won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, How Decent Folk Behave, and It’s the Sound of the Thing: 100 new poems for young people, which won the 2024 ABIA for Book of the Year for Younger Readers. Maxine is the inaugural Peter Steele Poet in Residence at the University of Melbourne.

This event is part of Constellations 2026, the community-led response to the attempts to silence Palestinian voices at Adelaide Writers' Week. We stand in solidarity with Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah.

This event is free and is made possible through volunteer efforts. All authors are being paid ASA rates, made possible through donations and sponsorship. We would appreciate any donation you are able to make.

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