Rachel Cusk

Cusk was born in Saskatoon to British parents in 1967 and spent much of her early childhood in Los Angeles. She moved to the United Kingdom in 1974. She read English at New College, Oxford.[2]

Cusk has written ten novels and four works of non-fiction. She published her first novel, Saving Agnes, at the age of twenty-six, and its themes of femininity and social satire remained central to her work over the next decade. In responding to the formal problems of the novel representing female experience, she began to work in non-fiction. She has published two autobiographical accounts of motherhood and divorce: A Life’s Work and Aftermath.[3][4] Cusk has been a professor of creative writing at Kingston University[5],[6].

Cusk's 2014 novel, Outline, was shortlisted for the Folio Prize,[7] the Goldsmiths Prize[8] and the Baileys prize.[9] In 2003, Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'.[10]

After a long period of consideration, Cusk began working in a new form that represented personal experience while avoiding the politics of subjectivity and literalism and remaining free from narrative convention. That project became a trilogy (Outline, Transit, and Kudos). Outline was one of the New York Times’s top 5 novels of 2015.[11]

Reviewing Outline in The New York Times, Heidi Julavits writes: "While the narrator is rarely alone, reading Outline mimics the sensation of being underwater, of being separated from other people by a substance denser than air. But there is nothing blurry or muted about Cusk’s literary vision or her prose: Spend much time with this novel and you’ll become convinced she is one of the smartest writers alive."[12]

Reviewing her novel, Transit, critic Helen Dunmore writing for The Guardian commended Cusk's "brilliant, insightful prose", adding, "Cusk is now working on a level that makes it very surprising that she has not yet won a major literary prize".[13]

In The New York Times review of Transit, Dwight Garner said the novel offers "transcendental reflections", and that he was waiting more eagerly for Kudos, the last novel of Rachel Cusk's trilogy, than for that of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series.[14]

Reviews of Kudos, the last novel of Cusk's trilogy, were largely positive.[15][16] Writing for The New Yorker, Katy Waldman called it "a book about failure that is not, in itself, a failure. In fact, it is a breathtaking success."[17]

Cusk was previously married to photographer Adrian Clarke, with whom she has two daughters.[18] The couple separated in 2011. Their divorce became a major topic in Cusk's writings.[4]

Cusk is married to artist Siemon Scamell-Katz. They live in London and Norfolk with Cusk's daughters.

Novels

• Saving Agnes (1993)
• The Temporary (1995)
• The Country Life (1997)
• The Lucky Ones (2003)
• In the Fold (2005)
• Arlington Park (2006)
• The Bradshaw Variations (2009)
• The Outline Trilogy
  1. Outline (2014)
  2. Transit (2017)
  3. Kudos (2018)

Non-fiction

• A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001)
• The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009)
• Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012)
• Coventry: Essays (2019)

Introductions and forewords

• Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (Penguin, 2008)
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (Folio Society, 2009)
• The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (Vintage, 2011)
• Complete Stories by Kingsley Amis (Penguin Classics, 2011)

• "Suburban Worlds: Rachel Cusk and Jon McGregor." In B. Schoene. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
• [26]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Rachel Cusk

• The New Yorker on Rachel Cusk and Outline
• The New York Times on Outline
• https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/books/outline-rachel-cusks-new-novel.html
• http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/outline-rachel-cusk/
• https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/the-uncoupling/508742/