TORONTO – London-based author Rachel Cusk didn’t win this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, but she did gain a huge personal reward from being a finalist.
“It’s been very fascinating for me, because I was born in this country but I’m an outsider,” she said at Tuesday’s Giller gala, where Toronto’s Andre Alexis took home the $100,000 Canadian literary prize for “Fifteen Dogs.”
“So it’s been interesting translating myself back into this place.”
READ MORE: Andre Alexis wins $100,000 Giller Prize
Cusk caused a stir when she made the Giller long and short lists for “Outline,” as many industry watchers here wondered who she was and whether she was really Canadian.
For the record, she is a citizen, having been born in Saskatoon. Her parents moved to the city as newlyweds from England, not knowing anyone.
“My dad got a job here and they established themselves in a place they didn’t know,” she said. “So it was a kind of pioneering act, I guess.”
But the family didn’t stay there long.
Cusk said she was “a small child” when they moved to Los Angeles, and then to the U.K., where she’s built her life.
“It’s been, I suppose, a missing jigsaw piece in my identity,” Cusk, who speaks with an English accent, said of her Canadian citizenship.
“I’ve never quite known what it meant.”
Cusk has had a renowned career internationally with eight novels including “Outline” (Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd) and three memoirs. In 2007, she made the short list for the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction for “Arlington Park.”
Cusk said she has been heavily influenced by Canadian women writers, including Alice Munro, Carol Shields, and Margaret Atwood.
But when “Outline” – about a woman writer who travels to Athens to teach a summer writing course – was recognized by the Giller jury as being “compulsively readable and dazzlingly intelligent,” some critics here wondered if it deserved consideration, since Cusk didn’t grow up in Canada.
“I think identity is fate and it is part of my identity,” said Cusk. “I didn’t insist on being included (in the Giller). I’m entitled to it, I guess, because I was born here, and that appears to be the view of my publisher.”
Cusk and her fellow Giller finalists – who also included Montreal’s Heather O’Neill, Vancouver-based Anakana Schofield, and Montreal’s Samuel Archibald – travelled across the country together to do readings over the past few weeks.
She said the experience has taught her a lot about her roots in Canada.
“It is the opposite to England. It has this huge wilderness behind it, and that’s an amazing feeling,” said Cusk.
“And I have thought a lot about my young parents and what they did coming here and what it must have been like. It’s been strange for me not ever knowing that.
“So that’s a lot of what I’ve been thinking about, coming here, is about their story.”
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