Background
Cooke, was born in 1976 and spent her childhood in Kilmahog: this house later formed the setting for her second novel. Cooke is a great, great granddaughter of biologist Thomas Henry Huxley.
Cooke, was born in 1976 and spent her childhood in Kilmahog: this house later formed the setting for her second novel. Cooke is a great, great granddaughter of biologist Thomas Henry Huxley.
She attended McLaren High School in Callander (Perthshire) and then the University of Edinburgh, where she gained a master"s degree in Social Anthropology.
Speaking in an interview with Aesthetica magazine in 2009, Cooke has said that her work is primarily concerned with questions of truth. She has developed the notion of truth as a depreciable asset. Cooke"s work deals with the concealment of truth on various levels, from personal self-deceptions to governments misleading the public.
She is the author of the novels The Glass House and Under The Mountain.
Cooke also contributed the short story At The Time to the anthology Damage Lands (2001), edited by Alan Bissett. Cooke"s first novel was published by Random House and shortlisted for the Saltire First Book of The Year Award.
In 2006 her short story Skin And Bones was broadcast on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4, performed by the actress Laura Fraser. Cooke"s poetry of the same year addressed environmental issues.
In 2009 she was living in Berlin.
Cooke also writes travel articles for The Guardian.
Her second novel Under the Mountain, published in 2008, showed a greater political emphasis than her previous work. This novel combined her interest in personal fabrications with wider social memes such as terrorism, and specifically with the construction of potentially false narratives around terrifying events (see Aesthetica interview). The political emphasis in Cooke"s work continued in 2009 with the performance of her first dramatic monologue, Protective Measures, at the Kikinda Short Story Festival in Serbia.
Critics have drawn parallels between Cooke"s work and that of Virginia Woolf (Scottish Review of Books, 2008) and of contemporary screenwriters such as Thomas Vinterberg (Manchester Evening News, 2004).