A Flat Place

Thursday 7 November 2024, 12 midday - 2pm

Blackwell's Bookshop, Oxford, 48-51 Broad Street,  OX1 3BQ

All welcome

Speaker: Dr Noreen Masud (University of Bristol)

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.

Environmental Humanities, TORCH Hubs, Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences, TORCH Networks