Rachel Cusk

Cusk was born in Saskatoon, Canada, spent part of her childhood in Los Angeles, and settled in England at eight, later reading English at Oxford. Her early novels were conventionally plotted and well reviewed, but it was two memoirs (A Life's Work (2001), on the disorienting reality of new motherhood, and Aftermath (2012), on the end of her marriage) that made her notorious, drawing accusations of cruelty for their refusal to soften what she'd actually felt.

The backlash left her, she has said, unable to write a conventional novel again, and she rebuilt her fiction from the ground up with Outline (2014), stripping the narrator down to almost nothing and letting the novel's substance arrive entirely through other people's confessions. Transit and Kudos completed the trilogy, and the method became one of the most influential in contemporary fiction.