We couldn't be any more excited to welcome Women's Prize-shortlisted author Noreen Masud to the bookshop! Noreen joins us to discuss A Flat Place, a love letter to Britain's breathtaking flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney, and a reckoning with the painful, hidden histories they contain. On this special occasion, Noreen will be in conversation with Kate Womersley, an NHS Doctor in Psychiatry whose research aims to improve sex and gender equity in biomedical research.A Flat Place
Noreen Masud has always loved flatlands. Her earliest memory is of a wide, flat field glimpsed from the back seat of her father's car in Lahore. As an adult in Britain she has discovered many more flat landscapes to love: Orford Ness, the Cambridgeshire Fens, Morecambe Bay, Orkney. These bare, haunted expanses remind her of the flat place inside herself: the place created by trauma.
Noreen 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.
About Noreen Masud
Noreen Masud is a lecturer in twentieth-century literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. A Flat Place, her first trade book, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, the Jhalak Prize and the Ondaatje Prize.
Event Venue
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place,Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Tickets
