Noreen Masud’s Shelf Life
Noreen Masud is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her academic monograph, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language (2022) won the MSA First Book Award 2023 and the University English Prize in 2024. Her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place (2023), was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction; The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year; the Jhalak Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize.
How and where are you?
At the moment I am catsitting Pumpkin and Kylo in South Bristol - Pumpkin is a chill, independent tabby and Kylo is a worried, people-oriented black cat who spends a lot of time staring at me. This second I am sitting cross-legged on the floor, and beside me Pumpkin is busily covering the carpet with his fur: rolling, loafing, washing. They are a good moment-to-moment distraction from the racist violence sweeping the UK. I feel very numb and very wound up.
What are you currently reading?
I'm judging an academic prize for first books, so I’m up to my eyes in stunningly good research in modernist studies. And I'm also reading Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib, about (among other things) the experience of travelling while brown.
And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming?
Normally the only shows I watch are Traitors, Taskmaster and Snackmasters. As a matter of principle I do not watch highbrow TV. But I’m trying to be less averse to new experiences, so I just finished Season One of Colin From Accounts.
And I just saw Visceral Canker, the Donald Rodney survey show at Spike Island in Bristol. I can’t stop thinking about it. Rodney had sickle-cell anaemia; he died at 37, leaving an extraordinary body of work around sickness, family, Blackness, racism, loss and so much more. I spent ages staring at his huge artworks made from pieced-together X-rays, drawn on with oil pastels and with words cut out.
What did you read as a child?
I grew up in Pakistan, where access to books was not guaranteed. My school library in primary school was a single shelf of pirated Enid Blytons; in secondary school, there were more books, but they were locked up in cases to prevent theft, and I was far too shy to ask anyone to get them out for me. I was one of the lucky ones, because my mother, who is British, brought books from the UK, and I read them again and again. Lots and lots of Enid Blyton, like any postcolonial child. Roald Dahl. Dorling Kindersley’s Big Book of Knowledge. Obscure children's books my mother had as a child: Mistress Masham’s Repose; The Runaway by Ruth Morris; Children of the Oregon Trail. And anything else I could find: my father’s medical journals, my mother's parenting magazines. The only thing I remember being prevented from reading was Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was 11; my mother took it away from me when she found me with it. But I was so hooked I stole it back and finished it.
Then at 14 I got into poetry and that was that. Dylan Thomas did me in; I sat reading ‘Poem in October’ from the photocopy my English Literature teacher distributed. I was furious and obsessed; I was absolutely scandalised by it. We weren’t allowed to do that to language! To use it like that! Were we? This revelation coincided with internet access, so I spent the next two years googling poems and printing them out and learning them by heart. Then I could repeat them to myself in my head when everything around me was awful.
Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them?
As a teenager, I was hooked on the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who understood how love and political ardour were inextricable. Then it was Salman Rushdie. ‘What kind of idea are you?’ he thunders in The Satanic Verses. I still wonder that. What kind of idea am I? As a very young person, literature was valuable to me if it did two things: if its rhythms and colours fizzed me up, and if it gave me ideas, or a form of words, about how to make the world better. Then, in my early twenties, it was The Waves by Virginia Woolf. Statement after declarative statement. Every moment of time in that novel becomes something poised, presented, balanced, owned. That mirrored my sense of my world. Experience is not, for me, something blurry. It’s very definite and brightly-coloured and strange.
I’ve talked about all these writers before; I’m trying to think of someone I've never mentioned. Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold rolled me over when I was 22. That was my first revelation that you could write about someone doing things without any explanation or justification. That people behave in ways they can’t even explain to themselves: perform odd actions without understanding why. I loved that. That still seems like the secret of life to me. I'm still preoccupied with writing about people and things who keep secrets from me, their author.
What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
I try not to read bad reviews. The worst ones, I think, are three-star reviews. One-star reviews just didn't get it, or are triggered and furious, or maybe the book arrived with messed-up pages because the delivery driver threw it over a wall. None of my business. Whereas a three-star review gets the book but doesn’t care for it; is unmoved by it, bored by it. That’s real sear-you-to-the-core stuff. My favourite bad review, though: a friend once sent me a screenshot of a Goodreads review of A Flat Place which knocked off a star because (the reviewer explained) they hadn’t yet finished reading the book. That makes me laugh whenever I think about it.
Tell us a little about your creative process.
I can only write or work when I outrun my strange confused brain: get under its radar, do the thing by stealth. I WhatsApp a lot of ideas or sentences to myself when I'm standing in queues, and load them into documents later. I gather and gather and gather and make little notes. And then there’s an awful stretch of time when I can’t settle, can’t focus on the hard work of making it cohere, and I wander around feeling agonised and hating myself. And then I get a deadline, somehow, and that forces me to just write the thing. It’s always awful and it never gets any better and no strategy works for more than about two weeks. I love it.
How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
The individuals in the publishing industry are lovely. I adore my agent and editor and publicist and so many others. They are amazing and kind and clever and back me up on every side; I have had zero of the terrible experiences that other racialised people in publishing have had, and that’s all down to them. As a system, though, there's a real scarcity-based terror about anything changing, about taking any risks. That underpinned the horrified reaction to Fossil Free Books, which campaigned for Baillie Gifford (sponsor of several book festivals and arts institutions) to divest from fossil fuel and arms companies. It is very hard to feel that those around you value book festivals more than doing anything possible to put a spanner in this poisoned system that kills and maims racialised children every single day. Most people want a quiet life. That’s hard, because if you’re marginalised that's not an option for you; you’re right up against the world’s clamour every single moment. I spoke on the radio recently, about the harm that Baillie Gifford has done: how its investments underpin AI-based attacks in Gaza, have led to the obliteration of whole families. A defender of Baillie Gifford replied, with great dignity, that Baillie Gifford gives free books to British children. What a response; what an idea, that that somehow balances the scales. That makes me laugh. That makes me feel insane.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
I’ve spoken elsewhere about the importance of Doris Lessing to me: ‘Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.’ The second-best piece of advice - or at least my most formative bit of advice - was from quite a mean but sad girl at school, who told me to stop whining. Fair enough. If you’re speaking about sad things, either try to make it funny/interesting/useful (Quentin Crisp put this best in Doing It With Style) or ask yourself why you’re talking about them. Do you want the situation to change? If so, how? What can you do about it? What action can you take?
What are you working on right now?
I’m writing two novels. I don’t know if they’ll come to anything. I can tell you that both are about the worst versions of myself: the person I might be if I was a little hungrier or tireder all the time, or had to work in an office.