Rachel Cooke was born in Sheffield. She trained as a reporter at The Sunday Times, was the television critic for The New Statesman and was latterly a writer for The Observer for which she won several awards. Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties was published by Virago in 2013, Kitchen Person: Notes on Cooking and Eating was published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in 2023, and she edited The Virago Book of Friendship, 2024.
