Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk was born in 1967. She is the author of the memoirs The Last Supper and A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, and of seven 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 Broadband Prize for Fiction; and The Bradshaw Variations. In 2003, Cusk was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

From her Q & A with Anna Metcalfe for the Financial Times:

What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?

Gogol’s Dead Souls and Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, although they were different kinds of laughter.

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Who are your literary influences?

DH Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf.

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What book do you most wish you’d written?

Jane Smiley’s The Age of Grief. You can only wish you’d written a book it would have been possible for you to write.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue