A Flat Place

Beautiful and haunting, a personal journey through Britain's flatlands and a reckoning with the painful memories and hidden histories they contain.

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud explores her enduring love for flat landscapes—celebrated for their stark beauty, formidable calm, and their ability to defy the human gaze. These landscapes reflect her inner world, embodying the 'flat place' within her, an emotional numbness and memory loss stemming from childhood trauma. However, for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, Britain's landscapes signify both a legacy and a sense of dispossession, providing solace yet remaining places of unrest.

Pursuing this paradox, Noreen weaves together impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore, and history of the land, alongside recollections from her own early life. She delivers a startlingly strange, vivid, and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape—a seemingly still and motionless place that is nonetheless defiantly alive.