Judith Thurman in The New Yorker wrote: 'Many experimental writers have rejected the mechanics of storytelling, but Cusk has found a way to do so without sacrificing its tension.' Outline was one of The New York Times 's top 5 novels of 2015. The books largely consist of an unnamed narrator chronicling the conversations she has with others, as she goes about her life as a writer. That project became a trilogy of ' autobiographical novels': Outline, Transit, and Kudos. Trilogy and later works Īfter 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. Cusk has been a professor of creative writing at Kingston University. In responding to the formal problems of the novel representing female experience, she began to work in non-fiction: A Life's Work, a memoir of motherhood published in 2001, and 2012's Aftermath, which chronicled her marriage to and divorce from her second husband, the photographer Adrian Clarke. Her seventh novel, Arlington Park, was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.

That same year, Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. In 2003 she published The Lucky Ones, a novel of linked stories about five different people, loosely connected to each other. She followed this in 1997 with The Country Life, a comedic novel inspired by Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Its themes of femininity and social satire remained central to her work over the next decade. Career Early works Ĭusk published her first novel, Saving Agnes in 1993 which received the Whitbread First Novel Award. She studied English at New College, Oxford. She comes from a wealthy Catholic family, and was educated at St Mary's Convent in Cambridge. She moved to her parents' native Britain in 1974, settling in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. Rachel Cusk (born 8 February 1967) is a British novelist and writer.Ĭusk was born in Saskatoon to British parents in 1967, the second of four children with an older sister and two younger brothers, and spent much of her early childhood in Los Angeles. Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012)

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