Noreen Masud: A Love Letter to Britain’s Flatlands

Noreen Masud has always been drawn to flat landscapes, those places usually ignored in favour of more dramatic scenery.

In her memoir, A Flat Place, she chronicles her travels around the UK to find these bare, haunted expanses, from Orkney to Orford Ness, making connections with the wide, flat fields she remembers from her childhood in Lahore, Pakistan. For Masud, this pilgrimage offered a means of exploring her own feelings of flatness and claustrophobia – symptoms of her complex PTSD.

Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Bristol. She reflects on space, trauma, and the vestiges of colonial history with Doreen Cunningham, whose memoir Soundings, Journeying North in the Company of Whales, documents her travels along the migration route of the grey whale to Arctic Alaska with her young son.

Click here for more about Noreen and her love of flatness

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Folkestone Book Festival is our annual celebration of books, ideas, reading and writing in its many magical forms. This year's festival has been curated by Jen Thatcher and James Harkin. Curating the festival for the first time, Jen and James have been inspired by Folkestone and how we can all come together through inspired discussion about global ideas, global thinking and possible futures.

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This year's festival is for everyone and we want to make it possible for more people than ever before to be able to come together and enjoy a packed festival. To make this possible we have introduced a £5 ticket. This is a no questions asked ticket for those that may be struggling to afford events and performances.

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We would like to thank our Principal Sponsor Saga, our Education Partner Canterbury Christ Church University, Le Shuttle and our Travel Partner, Southeastern. Creative Folkestone is also supported by Arts Council England, Folkestone and Hythe District Council, Kent County Council and The Roger De Haan Charitable Trust.