As someone who now, effectively, lives between three different countries, I’ve become increasingly interested in the relationship between space and self. I’m finding that, far from being the passive surroundings onto which we project our experiences of the world, the places in which we conduct our days are, in fact, the very ingredients that determine who we are and how we are able to think.

These themes take center stage in Noreen’s A Flat Place, a rich and winding work which has as its subject the specific environment of flat landscapes — those that are not just geographic, but social and psychological, as well. As she writes in her book, “A flat place helps us to reimagine what it means for something to ‘happen’ and to rethink what it means for something to ‘matter.’ To accept that not all discoveries involve digging for answers, or ascending heights.”

It was a joy to take in the intricate cartography of her thoughts, both in this book and through our conversation.

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Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton [Penguin] and Melville House Press, 2023), was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award, the Jhalak Prize, and the RSL Ondaatje Prize.

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Song: “Walk Through the Park,” by TrackTribe

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