Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk (b. 1967, Saskatoon, Canada) is a novelist and essayist who grew up in Los Angeles and moved to Great Britain with her family in 1974. She lives in Paris. Her debut novel, Saving Agnes (1993), received the Whitbread First Novel Award, and in 2003 she was named by Granta as one of the twenty Best Young British Novelists. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the Malaparte Prize (2024), and holds the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Her early novels — The Temporary (1995), The Country Life (1997), The Lucky Ones (2003) — established her as a fiction writer of formal ambition and psychological precision. Her two memoirs, A Life's Work (2001), on motherhood, and Aftermath (2012), on the breakdown of her marriage, generated considerable controversy and extended her literary territory into openly autobiographical territory. The Outline trilogy — Outline (2014), Transit (2016), and Kudos (2018) — marks a decisive formal transformation: narrated by a novelist teaching a writing course and attending literary events, each book is constructed almost entirely from the reported speech and testimonies of the people she encounters, removing conventional plot and interiority. Both Outline and Transit were shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Second Place (2021), longlisted for the Booker Prize, received the Prix Femina étranger.

Her most recent novel, Parade (2024), won the Goldsmiths Prize. It follows a figure identified only as G — an artist whose life contains many lives — across four sections, interrogating themes of art, gender, and self-construction through a fragmented and deliberately elusive narrative structure. Published in the United Kingdom by Faber & Faber and in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, her work has been translated into many languages.