Noreen Masud

Wednesday 12 March 2025

This was a cerebral event with some interesting and challenging political overtones. Ably and sympathetically interviewed by Andrew Burton, Noreen spoke of a number of issues, with a focus on her memoir A Flat Place (2023). The book charts her experiences of flat landscapes, including the Fens and the stretch of land between Shingle Street and Orford in Suffolk, and how they both inspire her and relate to her life history and psychological difficulties arising from childhood trauma. She explained this as a major strand of her talk, but touched on many other issues.

The author is currently a lecturer in twentieth-century English literature at the University of Bristol, but has a background in Pakistan, where she was born and where she spent her early years in the city of Lahore. As she described, Noreen was the daughter of an Anglophile doctor father from Pakistan and a British mother. She moved with her mother to Scotland at the age of 15. Her book, A Flat Place has the sub-title Moving through empty landscapes, naming complex trauma, which relates directly to her ability to connect the clarity and relative emptiness of flatness in the countryside with an understanding of, and coping mechanisms for, her own complex post-traumatic stress disorder¹.  

Noreen made reference to her previous work, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language, in a discussion about how the marginalised may be forced to speak so that they can be heard. This can be associated with her political activism, including the Fossil Free Books campaign, which led to the investment firm Baillie Gifford withdrawing funding from the Hay Literary Festival in 2023². She also referred to her current improved relationship with her mother, mentioning that they were planning ‘Swedish death cleaning’ (the terminology was new to me), which simply means that people sort out their personal belongings before death, so loved ones are spared the task.

Overall, this evening was wide ranging, fascinating and intensely thought-provoking, generating lively conversation in a highly engaged, capacity audience.  

Janet Bayliss

Knight, L. ‘I wouldn’t call it a victory’: Fossil Free Books organisers on Baillie Gifford’s exit from literary festival funding, Guardian, 11 June, [Accessed May 5, 2025].  

Charalambous, L. The benefits of Swedish death cleaning, British Geriatrics Society, 2024, 9 December,  [Accessed May 5, 2025].