Writer and lecturer Noreen Masud selects her favourite and most inspirational reads. Her new memoir, A Flat Place, is out now
Noreen Masud is a writer and a lecturer in 20th-century literature at the University of Bristol. Her memoir, A Flat Place, reflects on memory, trauma and her own feelings of belonging, as a Scottish-Pakistani woman, in the flat landscapes of Britain. Discover some of her top reading picks:
Strandings by Peter Riley (2022)
This brilliant book traces Riley’s lifelong obsession with a peculiar British subculture: the diverse and eccentric stealers of parts from stranded whales.
Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf (2022)
Woolf’s autobiographical writings weren’t published until after her death. But her breathtaking descriptions of her childhood environment help us see the world around us with new, shining eyes.
The Plains by Gerald Murnane (1982)
Few writers bother to depict flat landscapes. Gerald Murnane is the exception. Feted in his native Australia, much less known in the UK, Murnane’s weird novel about an alternative Australia – that celebrates plains and dismisses mountains – flips our value systems on their heads.
Related reads:
Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr (1958)
If you were lucky enough to read Marianne Dreams as a child, chances are that you’re still haunted by the bare landscape of Marianne’s dreams, populated by sinister, whispering stones.
Implements in their Places by WS Graham (1974)
‘What is the language using us for?’ asks poet WS Graham, as he takes us on a mysterious journey over a flat, white landscape of ice. Who is the hunter and who the hunted?
How does power warp and shift in the hands of language?
Skating to Antarctica by Jenny Diski (1997)
I identify strongly with Diski’s craving for a ‘boundless expanse of white’, which leads her to the barrenness of Antarctica in this extraordinary travel journal.
Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas (1953)
As a child in Pakistan, Thomas’s poems gave me my most compelling and vivid early encounter with British landscapes. His ‘torrent salmon sun’, his ‘rivers of the windfall light’.
