“I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.”

English novelist and writer, contemporary

Rachel Cusk is an English novelist and writer of memoir and other nonfiction. She is known for fiction and prose published across several books, and for a career that has drawn award recognition. Her work has won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, and has also been shortlisted and longlisted for prizes including the Governor General's Award and the Booker Prize. Her writing often addresses motherhood, marriage, satire, and more experimental approaches to narrative.