Noreen Masud was born and raised in Pakistan. She is a literary scholar working on the twentieth century, writing about things which, in one way or another, present variously as absurd, unrevealing, embarrassing or useless. These include aphorisms, flatness, spivs, puppets, nonsense, leftovers, earworms, footnotes, rhymes, hymns, surprises, folk songs, colours and superstition. She is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker 2020, and a Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol. Her first academic book is Hard Language: Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, forthcoming with OUP, and her first trade non fiction book A Flat Place was published by Hamish Hamilton (UK) and Melville House (US) in 2023, it was a Book of the Year in the New Yorker, the Guardian and the Sunday Times.