Uploaded January 2023 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
A conversation between Natasha Brown and Alice McCrum at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 10/01/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Natasha Brown speaks on debut novel Assembly. Sharp and unsettling, the work investigates structures of inequality in today’s society, and what it would take to undo them.
In Natasha Brown’s debut novel Assembly, a carefully crafted identity begins to come apart. When a successful Black woman receives unsettling news, she considers the constituent parts of her life: her high-paying job in finance, her prestigious education, her white boyfriend. Having formed herself into a success story, she finds her life reduced to the narrative white society demands of her. Ultimately, Brown’s narrator is forced to decide the price she is willing to pay to undo the structures which limit her, and reclaim agency over her circumstances. A poetic and concise examination of race, gender, and class, the work refuses to look away from the power relations comprising the core of the modern world.
About the speaker:
Natasha Brown is a British novelist. She was a 2019 London Writers Award recipient, a 2022 Burgess Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, and a Women’s Prize x Good Housekeeping Futures Award finalist. Assembly (2021) was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Orwell Prize for Fiction.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
A conversation between Natasha Brown and Alice McCrum at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 10/01/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Natasha Brown speaks on debut novel Assembly. Sharp and unsettling, the work investigates structures of inequality in today’s society, and what it would take to undo them.
In Natasha Brown’s debut novel Assembly, a carefully crafted identity begins to come apart. When a successful Black woman receives unsettling news, she considers the constituent parts of her life: her high-paying job in finance, her prestigious education, her white boyfriend. Having formed herself into a success story, she finds her life reduced to the narrative white society demands of her. Ultimately, Brown’s narrator is forced to decide the price she is willing to pay to undo the structures which limit her, and reclaim agency over her circumstances. A poetic and concise examination of race, gender, and class, the work refuses to look away from the power relations comprising the core of the modern world.
About the speaker:
Natasha Brown is a British novelist. She was a 2019 London Writers Award recipient, a 2022 Burgess Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, and a Women’s Prize x Good Housekeeping Futures Award finalist. Assembly (2021) was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Orwell Prize for Fiction.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
