University of Texas Acquires Papers of Acclaimed Author Rachel Cusk

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas has acquired the papers of acclaimed author Rachel Cusk.

Cusk’s papers include materials from the 1980s to today, representing the core of her career as a writer. The materials reflect her personal writing process in which much of her composition process occurs in her mind. She reveals her writing process within 16 notebooks and in additional papers and documents. The notebooks also include teaching notes, occasional journal entries, drawings by her children, appointment details and records of everyday life.

Cusk is the author of 10 novels including the critically acclaimed Outline Trilogy, which includes Outline (Picador, 2014), Transit (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) and Kudos (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018). Her debut novel was Saving Agnes (Picador, 1993). Cusk’s non-fiction works are A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (Picador, 2001), The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (Picador, 2009) and Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (Picador, 2012).

In 2003, Cusk was named one of Granta magazine’s Best Young Novelists. She has received numerous literary awards including the Whitebread First Novel award in 1993 for Saving Agnes. 

“Rachel Cusk is one of the most exciting novelists writing today,” said Stephen Enniss, director of the Ransom Center. “Her novels explore the way identity is shaped by language and reveal as well the way the novel may serve as a site of struggle over the self,” he noted. “In placing her papers at the Ransom Center, Cusk has given us an intimate record of that struggle with life and with art.”