Author(s): Noreen Masud

Nature Writing | 2024 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction | Psychology | Britain | Biography and Memoir | 2024 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction — short list

Raw and radical, unfamiliar and beguiling - a journey through Britain's breathtaking flatlands and a reckoning with the painful memories and hidden histories contained in those landscapes.

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 the landscape provides solace for this suffering, Britain's flatlands 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.

Review: It would be easy to assume that A Flat Place, dealing as it does in the currency of trauma, racism and exile, is a bleak book. But this memoir is too interested in what it means and how feels to be alive in a landscape to be anything other than arresting and memorable... Masud characterises with sly humour "the proper nature people", with maps in plastic pockets round their necks... In the flatlands of Britain, and in the memories they evoke of the flat places of Pakistan, Masud both finds a way to comprehend her own story and establishes a strong voice that confirms her as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience... A Flat Place is a slim volume, but that belies its expansive scope * Financial Times *
Masud's moving work of nature writing is grounded in a vital impulse: our need to bring suffering of all kinds out into the light -- India Bourke * New Statesman *
Nature writing can feel a bit samey [but] Noreen Masud offers a powerful antidote . . . A journey into flatness might sound like a tough sell, but this is so worth it. The whole book is zingily fresh * Sunday Times, 'Best Books of 2023' *
Stark, careful, enlightening -- Jenn Ashworth * Guardian, '2023 Summer Reads' *
A domineering father . . . features in Noreen Masud's lyrical, melancholy A Flat Place, in which the author travels to some of Britain's starkest landscapes, including Morecambe Bay, Orford Ness and Orkney, while reflecting on themes of exile, heritage and her troubled childhood in Lahore, Pakistan * Guardian, 'Best Memoirs and Biographies of 2023' *
Flat lands are overlooked, the bearers of our inattention. Moors, deserts, floodplains, fens alike have too often been effaced to the point of invisibility. In A Flat Place, Noreen Masud makes brilliantly good this lack; her book fathoms the depths of such landscapes, and their curious abilities to archive and erase, to unsettle and to console. In her prose, terrains of the spirit and the earth begin to slip over one another, like acetate sheets seeking a match. Sharply, subtly and very movingly, Masud thinks with places, seeking as she does to find a way back into, and then out of, the traumas of her early life -- Robert Macfarlane, author of 'The Old Ways'
Haunting and generous, beautifully written, revealing and refusing in the best ways - this book is a gift to all who have experienced complex trauma, all who seek the long view, all who crave solitude as we do community, all who see in flat landscapes the chance to reflect on the depths of the self as it heals -- Preti Taneja, author of 'Aftermath'
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. Stories of violence and memory, colonialism and patriarchy, family and friendship, are interwoven with delicacy and care. A Flat Place 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 'The Feminist Killjoy Handbook'
Marvellous. A radical, affecting testimony to unbroken spaces, histories, and notions of selves -- Eley Williams, author of 'The Liar's Dictionary'