Noreen Masud will be joining us to discuss A Flat Place her acclaimed memoir, published earlier this year and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024. She suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain’s flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life.

Noreen’s British-Pakistani heritage makes her a partial outsider in these landscapes: both coloniser and colonised, inheritor and dispossessed. Here violence lies beneath the fantasy of pastoral innocence, and histories of harm are interwoven with nature’s power to heal. Here, as in her own family history, are many stories that resist the telling. She pursues these paradoxes fearlessly across the flat, haunted spaces she loves, offering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of the land beneath her feet

Noreen is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker 2020. Her books are Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language (Oxford University Press, 2022), which won the MSA First Book Prize 2023, and A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton [Penguin], 2023), which has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024 and Jhalak Prize 2024, and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award.