By Finley Dyer, First year English
‘I just spent that week re-reading the email,’ Dr Masud told Epigram, ‘I didn’t really believe it until I heard back.’
The Associate Professor in Creative and Critical Writing is one of only 30 recipients from across the UK to win the coveted prize, which was set up in 2001 to recognise individuals of exceptional talent from various disciplines.
The money will help fund Dr Masud’s next non-fiction book, Blank Face, which will centre on face-blindness, also known as prosopagnosia.
The professor told Epigram that she has some degree of face-blindness herself. She said that her research aims to answer the question: ‘What happens if we de-centre the face?’, and wants to analyse how marginalised people see the world.
‘About 240 million people worldwide are affected by [prosopagnosia]’, she said, adding that so far, the field is ‘not very well known and understood.’
Dr Masud told Epigram the £100,000 would be split between research costs and covering her work at the University.
Professor Alison Donnell, Head of the School of Humanities, said, ‘The School of Humanities is delighted that the exceptional contribution made by Dr Noreen Masud’s critical and creative work on aphorism and flatness has been recognised with a Philip Leverhulme Prize.’
This isn’t the professor’s first national award; Dr Masud’s earlier work, Flat Place, was shortlisted in 2024 for the Sunday Times 2024 Young Writer of the Year Award.
It was described as a ‘beautifully written, important memoir’ by one critic.
The professor said that the application for the prize was ‘quick and easy’ and wanted to particularly thank Josie Gill, Associate Professor in Black British Writing, for her help in the process.
Featured image: Epigram / Ellen Reynolds
