Released 20.03.25

The Conversation

In this episode, writer Noreen Masud takes us on a journey through the flat landscapes of Lahore, Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, Orkney, the Newcastle Moors, and the Fens — terrains that mirror her inner world as she navigates a working diagnosis complex post traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD).

Sophy and Noreen talk about how mountains have been romanticised as a pinnacle of human achievement — something Noreen challenges. In an incisive conversation, they dig into the influence of modernists, including Virginia Woolf, and discuss W.G. Sebald (the hallowed author of Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn). Sebald’s signature blend of history, nature writing, memoir and travelogue may be skillful, but for Noreen, it also has ‘the kind of maleness to it and the kind of fascination with fact that has very little traction for me.’ 

The paradox of her work, Noreen finds, is that ‘people want me to tell the truth, but they don’t necessarily want to listen to inconvenient truths.’ She talks about her conflict in engaging with the ‘banalities about individual healing’ in the face of global injustice. From Islamophobia to post-colonial trauma, it’s important she says, for her ‘to play my tiny, invisible part in holding back the darkness.’ 

A Flat Place is radical. Not in the great romantic or heroic sense. Nor through some kind of redemption arc, which Noreen resists. It’s radical in its subversiveness, in its quiet refusal to bow to conventional mountains, both internal and external.