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Rachel Cusk

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Rachel Cusk
Born (1967-02-08) 8 February 1967 (age 57)
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
OccupationAuthor
LanguageEnglish
EducationNew College, Oxford
Notable worksA Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001)
Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012)
The Outline Trilogy: Outline (2014), Transit (2017) & Kudos (2018)

Rachel Cusk (born 8 February 1967)[1] is a Canadian-born novelist and writer who lives and works in England.

Childhood and education

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]

Career

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]

Personal life

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 retail consultant Siemon Scamell-Katz. They live in London and Norfolk with Cusk's daughters.[19]

Bibliography

Novels
Non-fiction
Introductions and forewords

Awards and prizes

Further reading

  • "Suburban Worlds: Rachel Cusk and Jon McGregor." In B. Schoene. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
  • [27]

References

  1. ^ Barber, Lynn (30 August 2009). "Rachel Cusk: A fine contempt". The Observer. Retrieved 23 April 2019.
  2. ^ Heti, Sheila. "The Art of Fiction No. 246". The Paris Review: 35–63.
  3. ^ Cusk, Rachel (21 March 2008). "I Was Only Being Honest". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 April 2019.
  4. ^ a b Kellaway, Kate (24 August 2014). "Rachel Cusk: 'Aftermath was creative death. I was heading into total silence'". The Observer. Retrieved 23 April 2019.
  5. ^ "Rachel Cusk interview | Lynn Barber". the Guardian. 29 August 2009. Retrieved 9 June 2020.
  6. ^ "Rachel Cusk". Poets & Writers. 19 June 2018. Retrieved 9 June 2020.
  7. ^ "The Folio Prize announces 2015 shortlist". The Folio Prize. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
  8. ^ Flood, Alison (1 October 2014). "Goldsmiths book prize shortlist includes crowd-funded first novel". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
  9. ^ Flood, Alison (13 April 2015). "Baileys women's prize for fiction shortlists debut alongside star names". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 25 January 2016.
  10. ^ "Granta list of Best Young British Novelists". 2003.
  11. ^ "The 10 Best Books of 2015". The New York Times. 3 December 2015. Retrieved 23 April 2019.
  12. ^ Julavits, Heidi (11 January 2015). "Rachel Cusk's Outline". The New York Times.
  13. ^ Dunmore, Helen (28 August 2016). "Transit by Rachel Cusk – a woman's struggle to rebuild her life". The Guardian.
  14. ^ Garner, Dwight (17 January 2017). "Rachel Cusk's Transit Offers Transcendent Reflections". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
  15. ^ Smee, Sebastian (29 May 2018). "With Kudos, Rachel Cusk completes a literary masterpiece". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 30 May 2018.
  16. ^ Garner, Dwight (21 May 2018). "With Kudos, Rachel Cusk Completes an Exceptional Trilogy". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 30 May 2018.
  17. ^ Waldman, Katy (22 May 2018). "Kudos, the Final Volume of Rachel Cusk's "Faye" Trilogy, Completes an Ambitious Act of Refusal". The New Yorker. Retrieved 30 May 2018.
  18. ^ Cusk, Rachel (17 February 2012). "Rachel Cusk: my broken marriage". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 April 2019.
  19. ^ "About". Siemon Scamell-Katz. Retrieved 5 July 2020.
  20. ^ "Whitbread Winners 1971-2005" (PDF). Costa Book Awards. Retrieved 29 January 2017.
  21. ^ "Previous winners of the Somerset Maugham Awards". The Society of Authors. Retrieved 29 December 2016.
  22. ^ "Whitbread 2003 shortlists". The Daily Telegraph. 10 November 2003. Retrieved 5 March 2017.
  23. ^ "In the Fold". The Man Booker Prizes. Retrieved 30 December 2016.
  24. ^ "The Scotiabank Giller Prize Presents Its 2015 Shortlist". Scotiabank Giller Prize. Canada. 5 October 2015. Retrieved 5 March 2017.
  25. ^ "The Scotiabank Giller Prize Presents Its 2017 Shortlist". Scotiabank Giller Prize. Canada. 2 October 2017. Retrieved 2 October 2017.
  26. ^ Gatti, Tom (26 September 2018). "Rachel Cusk makes Goldsmiths Prize shortlist for the third time". New Statesman. Retrieved 23 April 2019.
  27. ^ Julavits, Heidi (7 January 2015). "Rachel Cusk's Outline". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 April 2019.
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