Universality

From the critically acclaimed author of Assembly, which was shortlisted for numerous prizes including the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, Natasha Brown brings her new novel, Universality, to Brighton Festival. Natasha talks to award winning author and Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University, Preti Taneja, about the book, described as a compellingly nasty celebration of the spectacular force of language which dares you to look away.

The novel opens late one night on a Yorkshire farm with a man 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. Universality is a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power. 

Preti Taneja's We That Are Young won the 2017 Desmond Elliott Prize for the finest literary debut novel of the year and was listed for awards including the Folio Prize, India's Shakti Bhatt Prize and Europe's premier award for a work of literature, the Prix Jan Michalski. It is published in the USA by AA Knopf and in translation around the world. Preti's lyrical nonfiction book Aftermath won the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize for literature that is 'fearless in ambition and execution.' Aftermath was shortlisted for a British Book Award and was a New Statesman, White Review, and a New Yorker Book of the Year. In 2022, Preti was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Languages and Literatures for her groundbreaking, experimental work. She is a Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.