Natasha Brown | author
As a paid subscriber, you have access to my full archive, book club guides, author deep dives, and more exclusive content. You can also request personalised book recommendations from me.
This page contains a book club guide to Universality (read my book review here). Please see my Index for all the content that you have access to.
Author deep dive: Natasha Brown
Natasha Brown is a British novelist known for her acclaimed debut Assembly (2021) and her 2025 Booker-longlisted second novel Universality.
She grew up in London, with her parents having met while studying abroad in the US, and spent much of her childhood in her grandparents’ book-filled home (Financial Times, 2025). She then studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and spent a decade after graduating working in financial services, writing snippets of Assembly in her spare time as a break from her regular job. Working full-time meant both that she could not keep a regular schedule, and that she could take risks she wouldn’t have been able to if she had been relying on writing for her income. She was, for example, able to resist the pressure to write more standard-length novels (MasterMind, 2025). Her background in maths gives her a deep appreciation for logic and minimalism, alongside an openness to using the same rules in different ways, and her work in fast-paced finance honed her skills in precision and brevity. Alongside allowing her to explore her writing interests, Brown points out in the Financial Times that corporate life offers social mobility and security that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
