A Flat Place

shortlisted for Women’s Prize for Non Fiction, 2024

shortlisted for Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, 2024

shortlisted for Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, 2024

shortlisted for Jhalak Prize, 2024

shortlisted for Books Are My Bag Readers Award, 2024

‘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. This is a lovingly crafted work in which stories of violence and memory, colonialism and patriarchy, family and friendship, are as layered as a landscape. A Flat Place also 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 Living A Feminist Life