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Tributes have been paid to the journalist and critic Rachel Cooke after her death from cancer.
Cooke, 56, was diagnosed with the illness earlier this year and died on Friday. She worked for the Observer for 25 years, where she was described as “the backbone of the paper”.
On a tribute posted on the newspaper’s website, Tim Adams, the editor of New Review, said: “Rachel could not only do everything as a journalist – fearless and funny commentary, ego-piercing interviews, campaigning social reporting, erudite and blistering book reviews, taste-making food writing, courageous foreign reportage – she could invariably do it all better, and quicker, than anybody else.”
Jane Ferguson, a former editor of New Review, said Cooke had “intellectual ballast, lightly worn, authority, bite, humour and positively fizzed with ideas”. Ferguson added: “Despite filing over 100,000 words annually over decades, she somehow still had time to read and see everything.”
The journalist Sonia Sodha, a former colleague of Cooke’s at the Observer, said: “I feel so lucky to have had Rachel Cooke as a friend and colleague in recent years.” Sodha described Cooke as “funny, kind, clever, a truly exceptional writer” who was a “loyal sister-in-arms” to feminist colleagues.
The Guardian interviewer and features writer Simon Hattenstone described Cooke as “the brilliant Observer journalist who could write wonderfully about anything” adding that she would be “hugely, hugely missed”.
Born in Sheffield in 1969, Cooke was the daughter of a university botany lecturer and a biology teacher. She spent part of her childhood in Jaffa, Israel, attending a Church of Scotland school where Arab and Jewish children were taught together. She studied at the University of Oxford, before beginning her journalism career on the Sunday Times. She also wrote a television column for the New Statesman.
As part of her role at the Observer, Cooke wrote a monthly food column. In 2023, she published Kitchen Person, a collection of her culinary writing, inspired in part by her grandmother, a working-class woman from Sunderland who was “touched with a kind of genius in the kitchen”.
Adams said Cooke had “an emotional connection to lunch and dinner” throughout her life. He added: “She would invariably roll her eyes at any mention of diets or dry Januarys.”
Cooke is survived by her husband, the writer Anthony Quinn, with whom she lived in Islington, north London.
