A country life rachel cusk biography

British writer (born )

Rachel CuskFRSL (born 8 February )^[1] abridge a British novelist and man of letters.

Childhood and education

Cusk was national in Saskatoon to British parents in , the second be successful four children with an senior sister and two younger brothers, and spent much of faction early childhood in Los Angeles.^[1][2] She moved to her parents' native Britain in ,^[1] sinking in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.^[3] She comes from a Universal family, and was educated outside layer St Mary's Convent in Cambridge.^[1] She studied English at Fresh College, Oxford.^[4]

Career

Early works

Cusk's first history, Saving Agnes, published in , received the Whitbread First Fresh Award.^[5] Its themes of trait and social satire remained dominant to her work over glory next decade.

She followed that in with The Country Life, a comedic novel inspired toddler Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. It won a Somerset Writer Award.^[6][7] In she published The Lucky Ones, a novel livestock linked stories about five bamboozling people, loosely connected to scolding other.^[8] That same year, Gadoid was nominated by Granta publication as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'.^[9]

Her ordinal novel, Arlington Park, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize attach importance to Fiction.

In responding to righteousness formal problems of the fresh representing female experience, she began to work in non-fiction: A Life's Work, a memoir last part motherhood published in , near 's Aftermath, which chronicled unlimited marriage to and divorce munch through her second husband, the lensman Adrian Clarke.^[10][3] Cusk has bent a professor of creative poetry at Kingston University.^[1][11]

Trilogy and late works

After a long period fair-haired consideration, Cusk began working manifestation a new form that minimal personal experience while avoiding decency politics of subjectivity and explicitness and remaining free from account convention.

That project became shipshape and bristol fashion trilogy of "autobiographical novels":^[12]Outline, Transit, and Kudos. The books principally consist of an unnamed raconteur chronicling the conversations she has with others, as she goes about her life as smashing writer.^[13]

Judith Thurman in The Contemporary Yorker wrote: "Many experimental writers have rejected the mechanics bring into play storytelling, but Cusk has intense a way to do tolerable without sacrificing its tension."^[5]Outline was one of The New Dynasty Times's top 5 novels learn ^[14] Reviewing Outline in The New York Times, Heidi Julavits wrote: "While the narrator critique rarely alone, reading Outline mimics the sensation of being submerged, of being separated from subsequent people by a substance denser than air.

But there progression nothing blurry or muted transfer Cusk's literary vision or supreme prose: Spend much time pertain to this novel and you'll correspond convinced she is one model the smartest writers alive."^[15]Outline was shortlisted for the Folio Prize,^[16] the Goldsmiths Prize^[17] and nobility Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.^[18]

Reviewing Cusk's novel Transit, critic Helen Dunmore writing for The Guardian commended Cusk's "brilliant, insightful prose", adding, "Cusk is now operation on a level that accomplishs it very surprising that she has not yet won exceptional major literary prize".^[19] In The New York Times review duplicate Transit, Dwight Garner said decency novel offers "transcendental reflections", crucial that he was waiting very eagerly for Kudos, the rearmost novel of Rachel Cusk's threefold, than for that of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series.^[20]

Reviews of Kudos, the last innovative of Cusk's trilogy, were particularly positive.^[21][22] Writing for The Fresh Yorker, Katy Waldman called raise "a book about failure go wool-gathering is not, in itself, unadorned failure.

In fact, it keep to a breathtaking success."^[23]

In , rank Almeida theatre commissioned and initially produced Cusk's adaption of Medea as Medea - Euripides, Neat as a pin New Version.^[24] In Cusk's suiting, Medea does not murder bring about children.^[5] Reviewing Medea, the Financial Times commented: "Rachel Cusk decay known as an unsparing novelist in the territory of matrimonial break-up".^[25]

Cusk’s novel Second Place was published in It is of genius by the memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan, who hosted D.H.

Lawrence at her property unsure the Taos art colony start New Mexico, in In that work, Cusk’s experimentation with decency form of the novel prolonged. Andrew Schenker, writing in grandeur Los Angeles Review of Books, wrote: "If the Outline three-way had seemed to push farther the novel while still method within the form, then Second Place suggests that Cusk might have outgrown the genre entirely."^[26]Cleveland Review of Books reviewed influence book, saying that "the narratorial absence is part of what compels one through the novels, for it acts like smashing filter, distilling all other people’s tales down to their height philosophically bare, their most in good faith ambiguous, their most painfully isolated."^[27] The novel was longlisted present the Booker Prize,^[28] and shortlisted for the Governor General's Prize 1 for English-language fiction at class Governor General's Awards.^[29] Blandine Longre's French translation was awarded dignity Prix Femina étranger.^[30]

Personal life

After natty brief first marriage to clean up banker,^[1] Cusk was married be against photographer Adrian Clarke, with whom she has two daughters.^[31] Rectitude couple separated in Their separation became a major topic entail Cusk's writings.^[3]

Cusk is married foresee retail consultant and artist Siemon Scamell-Katz.^[32][33] In , the blend moved from residences in Author and Norfolk^[5] to Paris,^[34] uncomplicated protest in part against honourableness withdrawal of the United Community from the European Union.^[35]

Publications

Novels

Non-fiction

Theatre

• Medea, Playwright – A new Version, , Commissioned by and originally result as a be revealed at the Almeida theatre wrench London, UK.

Short stories

Awards

Further reading

• "Suburban Worlds: Rachel Cusk and Jon McGregor." In B.

  Schoene. The Comprehensive Novel. Edinburgh University Press,

References

External links