Two More Amazing events in June

Here’s what Scratch say about Claire’s collection:

The Unreliable Nature Writer is the eagerly-awaited debut collection of exhilarating, unsettling and dreamy short stories from Claire Carroll. Carroll portrays an unsettlingly hot world of people facing the strain of intimate and global anxieties – trying to live alongside new technologies and failing environments. Delightful to read and unsettling to imagine, these are haunting stories about love, loss and strangely-exposing housing applications.

Reviews of The Unreliable Nature Writer:

‘Brilliant. A playful and witty take on our relationship with the natural world.’ Irenosen Okojie, award-winning author of Nudibranch.

‘Ominous yet deeply tender, surreal yet undeniable. I could not look away.’ Saba Sams, author of Edge Hill Short Story Prize winning collection, Send Nudes.

Claire Carroll lives in Somerset and writes experimental fiction about the intersection of nature, technology, and desire. Her short stories have been published by journals including The London Magazine, Gutter Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, Lunate Journal and Short Fiction Journal, as well as shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize.

The talk will be chaired by Professor Samantha Walton, who is the author of Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure which explores the culture, history and politics of the ‘nature cure’. Her poetry books include Bad Moon and Self Heal. As an academic she has published two monographs, including an ecological study of Nan Shepherd. She is Professor of Modern Literature at Bath Spa University and Director of the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities.

We‘re thrilled to be welcoming Noreen Masud to the shop to discuss her multi-award nominated memoir, A Flat Place, with author and creative writing teacher, Lily Dunn.

Part memoir, part visionary rallying cry, A Flat Place is one of the most acclaimed non-fiction debuts of recent years.

Here’s more on the book from publisher, Penguin:

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

Noreen Masud has always loved flat landscapes – their stark beauty, their formidable calm, their refusal to cooperate with the human gaze. They reflect her inner world: the ‘flat place’ she carries inside herself, emotional numbness and memory loss as symptoms of childhood trauma. But as much as Britain’s landscapes provide solace for suffering, they are also uneasy places for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession.”

“Pursuing this paradox across the wide open plains that she loves, Noreen weaves her impressions of the natural world with the poetry, folklore and history of the land, and with recollections of her own early life, rendering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape – a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive.”

Reviews:

“In the flatlands of Britain, and in the memories they evoke of the flat places of Pakistan, Masud both finds a way to comprehend her own story and establishes a strong voice that confirms her as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience… A Flat Place is a slim volume, but that belies its expansive scope.”
Financial Times

“Masud’s moving work of nature writing is grounded in a vital impulse: our need to bring suffering of all kinds out into the light.”
India Bourke, New Statesman

“A journey into flatness might sound like a tough sell, but this is so worth it. The whole book is zingily fresh.”
Sunday Times, ‘Best Books of 2023’

“Stark, careful, enlightening”
Jenn Ashworth, Guardian

“A domineering father . . . features in Noreen Masud’s lyrical, melancholy A Flat Place, in which the author travels to some of Britain’s starkest landscapes, including Morecambe Bay, Orford Ness and Orkney, while reflecting on themes of exile, heritage and her troubled childhood in Lahore, Pakistan.”
Guardian, ‘Best Memoirs and Biographies of 2023’

“Sharply, subtly and very movingly, Masud thinks with places, seeking as she does to find a way back into, and then out of, the traumas of her early life.”
Robert Macfarlane

“A beguiling mix of landscape and memory . . . utterly original and haunting. Her beautiful and tender prose inducts one into a completely new way of seeing the world – a vision that is absorbing, evocative and memorable.”
Suzannah Lipscomb

“A beautifully written and elegantly constructed work that takes the author’s love for an usual kind of landscape and moves it into the most unexpected and thought provoking directions.”
Kamila Shamsie

“Haunting and generous, beautifully written, revealing and refusing in the best ways – this book is a gift to all who have experienced complex trauma, all who seek the long view, all who crave solitude as we do community, all who see in flat landscapes the chance to reflect on the depths of the self as it heals.”
Preti Taneja

Noreen Masud

Dr Noreen Masud is a lecturer in twentieth century literature at the University of Bristol. Her monograph, Hard Language (2022) on the work of Stevie Smith, was the joint winner of the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize in 2023. Noreen is also an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker, making programmes for BBC Radio 3 and 4. Her memoir, A Flat Place, has been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Jhalak Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. It was also selected for numerous Books of the Year lists, including by the New Yorker, the Guardian,The News On Sunday (Pakistan) and the Sunday Times.

Lily Dunn

Dr Lily Dunn is a writer, editor and creative writing teacher. She is the author of the novel, Shadowing the Sun, and the memoir, Sins of My Father, which was The Guardian and The Spectator Nonfiction Book of the Year, 2022. She is also the editor of an anthology of recovery stories, A Wild and Precious Life. Lily has a PhD in Creative Writing and teaches Narrative Nonfiction at Bath Spa University. Her book, Into Being: The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform,will be published by Manchester University Press in 2025.