Reading and Q&A with Noreen Masud

Reading and Q&A with Noreen Masud

Friday 27 March 6-7pm
PWYC: £5-£8

A Meet the Author reading and talk with Noreen Masud. Her recent memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place, (Hamish Hamilton [Penguin] and Melville House Press, 2023), uses her relationship with landscape to explore personal history, trauma and how it also offers belonging and safety.

It has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award, the Jhalak Prize, the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards.

The event will be hosted by Lucy Beckley.

Noreen Masud is an Associate Professor 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 (2022) won the MSA First Book Award 2023 and the University English Prize in 2024.

‘In this profound and moving book, Noreen Masud shows how what has been overlooked as flat and empty is alive with significance. The writing is not only achingly beautiful, it conveys in its own rhythm how small undulations give nuance and form. We learn how complex trauma gets everywhere, affects everything; who one is, how one is, with whom one is. This is a lovingly crafted work in which stories of violence and memory, colonialism and patriarchy, family and friendship, are as layered as a landscape. A Flat Place also teaches us how the struggle some of us have to be in the world can be how we craft different worlds. It reminds us that there is hope in the smallest of gestures.’ Sara Ahmed, author of Living A Feminist Life

This event is in partnership with Literature Works

Noreen will be doing a workshop beforehand, which can be booked here.