Early works
Cusk's first novel, Saving Agnes, published in 1993, received the Whitbread First Novel Award. Its themes of femininity and social satire remained central to her work over the next decade. She followed this in 1995 with The Temporary, then with 1997's The Country Life, a comedic novel inspired by Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. It won a 1998 Somerset Maugham Award. In 2003 she published The Lucky Ones, a novel of linked stories about five different people, loosely connected to each other. That same year, Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Her seventh novel, Arlington Park, was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2009, she taught creative writing at Kingston University.
Trilogy and later works
LiteratureXchange Festival in Aarhus (Denmark 2025)
After 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. That project became a trilogy of "autobiographical novels": Outline, Transit, and Kudos. The books largely consist of an unnamed narrator chronicling the conversations she has with others, as she goes about her life as a writer.
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. Reviewing Outline in The New York Times, Heidi Julavits wrote: "While the narrator is rarely alone, reading Outline mimics the sensation of being underwater, of being separated from other people by a substance denser than air. But there is nothing blurry or muted about Cusk's literary vision or her prose: Spend much time with this novel and you'll become convinced she is one of the smartest writers alive." Outline was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
Reviewing Cusk's novel Transit, critic Helen Dunmore writing for The Guardian commended Cusk's "brilliant, insightful prose", adding, "Cusk is now working on a level that makes it very surprising that she has not yet won a major literary prize". In The New York Times review of Transit, Dwight Garner said the novel offers "transcendental reflections", and that he was waiting more eagerly for Kudos, the last novel of Rachel Cusk's trilogy, than for that of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series.
Reviews of Kudos, the last novel of Cusk's trilogy, were largely positive. Writing for The New Yorker, Katy Waldman called it "a book about failure that is not, in itself, a failure. In fact, it is a breathtaking success."
In 2015, the Almeida theatre commissioned and originally produced Cusk's adaption of Medea as Medea - Euripides, A New Version. In Cusk's adaptation, Medea does not murder her children. Reviewing Medea, the Financial Times commented: "Rachel Cusk is known as an unsparing writer in the territory of marital break-up".
Cusk's novel Second Place was published in 2021. It is inspired by the memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan, who hosted D.H. Lawrence at her property at the Taos art colony in New Mexico, in 1924. In this work, Cusk's experimentation with the form of the novel continued. Andrew Schenker, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, wrote: "If the Outline trilogy had seemed to push beyond the novel while still working within the form, then Second Place suggests that Cusk may have outgrown the genre entirely." Cleveland Review of Books reviewed the book, saying that "the narratorial absence is part of what compels one through the novels, for it acts like a filter, distilling all other people's tales down to their most philosophically bare, their most ethically ambiguous, their most painfully isolated." The novel was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2021 Governor General's Awards. Blandine Longre's French translation was awarded the 2022 Prix Femina étranger.
