Noreen Masud and Feryal Ali-Gauhar chaired by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Two authors of Pakistani heritage, Feryal Ali-Gauhar and Noreen Masud discuss their latest books and their writing.

Ali-Gauhar is an actor, film-maker, columnist, animal rights activist and acclaimed novelist. Her latest novel, An Abundance of Wild Roses, is set in the Black Mountains of Pakistan where the spirits of the mountains keep an eye on the doings of humans. It is a land of myth and tradition facing the march of progress and ongoing conflict. Can the villagers find a way to co-exist with nature that doesn’t destroy them both? Ali-Gauher’s first novel, The Scent of Wet Earth in August, was a bestseller in India, and her second novel, No Space for Further Burials, won the Patras Bokhari award and was translated into several European languages.

Masud is a lecturer in 20th-century literature at the University of Bristol. She was born in Lahore to a British mother and Pakistani father and moved to the UK as a teenager. In A Flat Place, she reflects on her love of flat landscapes and the way they reflect her inner world, the ‘flat place’ she carries inside herself, emotional numbness and memory loss as symptoms of childhood trauma. Masud weaves impressions of the natural world with poetry and folklore and recollections of her early life. Discussions are chaired by journalist and author Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.