Noreen Masud has always loved flat landscapes – their stark beauty, their formidable calm, their refusal to cooperate with the human gaze. They reflect her inner world: the ‘flat place’ she carries inside herself, as a symptom of childhood trauma. But as much as Britain’s landscapes provide solace for suffering, they are also uneasy places for a ScottishPakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession. A Flat Place is a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a posttraumatic, post-colonial landscape – a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive. Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her academic monograph, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language won the MSA First Book Award and the University English Prize; her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award, the halak Prize, and the RSL Ondaatje Prize.

Co-sponsored by the Climate Crisis Thinking Network.