Rachel Cusk

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.

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.

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."

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

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

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

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.