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• Weston Lit Fest: Authors Noreen Masud and Richard Milward in conversation

Weston Lit Fest: Authors Noreen Masud and Richard Milward in conversation

A Flat Place – Noreen Masud

Raw and radical, strange and beguiling – a love letter to Britain’s breathtaking flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney, and a reckoning with the painful, hidden histories they contain.

Noreen Masud has always loved flatlands. Her earliest memory is of a wide, flat field glimpsed from the back seat of her father’s car in Lahore. As an adult in Britain she has discovered many more flat landscapes to love.   Bare, haunted expanses that remind her of the flat place inside herself: the place created by trauma.

‘Expansive, arresting, with sly humour… Masud establishes herself as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience’ Financial Times

‘Noreen Masud fathoms the depths of flat landscapes – sharp, subtle and very moving’ Robert Macfarlane

Man Eating Typewriter – Richard Milward

‘We’re all in the gutter but some of us are ogling the sparkles.’

Set at the fag-end of the 1960s and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy London purveyor of pulp fiction, ‘Man-eating Typewriter’ is a homage to the avant-garde counterculture of the 20th century. Told in Polari, it is the story of an anarchist named Raymond Novak and his plan to commit a ‘fantabulosa crime’ in 276 days that will revolt the world.

Constructed like a hallucinogenic cocktail of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, ‘Pale Fire’ and Jean Genet’s jailbird fantasies, ‘Man-eating Typewriter’ is an act of seductive sedition by a writer with unfathomable literary talent and boldness.

“A major talent:” Irvine Welsh on Richard Milward

“Remarkable, beautiful, magic. Like Ulysses for those who can’t cope with reading Ulysses:”’ Paolo Hewitt on Man Eating Typewriter

About the authors:
Noreen Massud is a  BBC New Generation Thinker and lecturer at University of Bristol. She specialises in 20th century literature, with notable focus on Stevie Smith,  and queer and affect theory. Her work focuses on how apparently dull and unrevealing flat landscapes articulate difficult or tricky feelings, and her memoir ‘‘A Flat Place’ has received rave reviews.

Richard Milward was born 26th October 1984 in Middlesbrough, England. In 2007, his debut novel Apples (Faber) was published when Richard was the tender age of twenty-two, to great critical acclaim. Richard’s fourth novel, Man-Eating Typewriter (2023) has received numerous accolades including  Telegraph (‘deserves to be boosted by a prize or two’), the Literary Review (‘a phenomenal achievement’) and the Guardian (‘a genuinely exhilarating entertainment’). Richard’s books have been translated into nine different languages, and his writing (fiction and non-fiction) has appeared in The Face, Dazed & Confused, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, Arena and others.

Weston Lit Fest is produced in partnership with Weston-super-Mare Town Council and The Write Box.