A Flat Place: Noreen Masud in conversation with Sarah Thomas

CAMPLE LINE is delighted to welcome Noreen Masud, author of 'A Flat Place', to Cample, located 20 miles inland from the merse and tidal flats of the Nith Estuary. Please join us for this special Book Week Scotland event with Noreen who will read excerpts from her recently published memoir 'A Flat Place' and be in conversation with Galloway-based writer Sarah Thomas.

One of Noreen’s earliest memories is of a wide, flat field glimpsed from the back of her father’s car in Lahore in Pakistan. As an adult in Britain she discovered many more flat landscapes: Orford Ness, the Cambridgeshire fens, Newcastle Townmoor, Morecambe Bay, Orkney. These bare expanses reminded her of the flat place inside herself: the place created by trauma. ‘I’d begun, slowly, to understand that complex post-traumatic stress disorder or cPTSD, was different. It was particularly difficult to treat, because – like a flat landscape – it didn’t offer a significant landmark, an event, that you could focus on and work with.’

Her memoir, 'A Flat Place', is structured around various flat landscapes that Noreen has visited or lived near to, and she explores how these places have helped her understand and relate to the cPTSD she developed during her difficult upbringing. In conversation with Katie Goh, she said: ‘I was interested in moving through a flat landscape and how we react to it. There’s something that happens to you when you stay in a repetitive place over a long period of time. You enter a space where your mind can wander and come back while your brain does whatever it needs to do to survive.’

'A Flat Place' has been shortlisted for: The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2024 , The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024 , The Jhalak Prize 2024, The Ondaatje Prize 2024, and Book of the Year 2023 according to The Guardian, Sunday Times, and New Yorker.

Noreen Masud was born and raised in Pakistan. She is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker 2020 and a Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol. Her first academic book is Hard Language: Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, forthcoming with OUP, and her first trade non fiction book A Flat Place was published by Hamish Hamilton (UK) and Melville House (US) in 2023.

Sarah Thomas is a writer and documentary filmmaker based in Galloway. Her debut memoir set in Iceland, The Raven’s Nest, was published by Atlantic Books in 2022. She has been a regular contributor to Dark Mountain journal, and her writing has also appeared in the Guardian and the anthology Women On Nature edited by Katharine Norbury. She was longlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize. This is a ticketed event and booking is required. Tea, coffee and refreshments will be provided.