Noreen Masud, author of The Flat Place, is in conversation with author Peter Riley (Strandings) as we launch the paperback edition. We're such fans of this book, and are thrilled to be hosting this event. We're equally thrilled to see The Flat Place appear on so many literary longlists over the last few weeks - so come and celebrate!
Tickets are £4 - book a free spot here and entry fee will be collected at the door.
The Flat Place
The Flat Place has been SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024, LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024, and is a BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 for the GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, and NEW YORKER.
Raw and radical, strange and beguiling - a love letter to Britain's breathtaking flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney, and a reckoning with the painful, hidden histories they contain. 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, emotional numbness and memory loss as symptoms of childhood trauma. But as much as Britain's landscapes provide solace for suffering, they are also uneasy places for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession.
Pursuing this paradox across the wide open plains that she loves, Noreen weaves her impressions of the natural world with the poetry, folklore and history of the land, and with recollections of her own early life, rendering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape - a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive.