Coventry - Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk was born in 1967 and is the author of eight novels: Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Temporary, The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Lucky Ones, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, In the Fold, Arlington Park, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, The Bradshaw Variations and Outline. Her non-fiction books are A Life's Work, The Last Supper and Aftermath. In 2003 she was chosen as one of Granta's Best of Young Novelists.

Rachel Cusk is always an exciting writer: striking and challenging, with a distinctive cool prose voice, and behind that coolness something untamed and full of raw force . . .
Tessa Hadley

Cusk has glimpsed the central truth of modern life . . . She moves through it as a blasted centre full only of instinct and superhuman hearing and hackles.
Patricia Lockwood

Fiercely intelligent, with enviable prose that is at once luminous and precise.
New Statesman - Kathryn Maris

Brilliant . . . Cusk's voice is as original as ever.
Evening Standard - Claire Harman

The word that keeps coming to mind is "formidable". It describes her intelligence in writing about everything from literature to parenthood.
Irish Times - Alan Simpson

Cusk is a master of the genre and her collection of sharp, provocative essays had me transfixed.
Guardian 'Books of the Year' - Bart van Es