‘Hugely missed’: Tributes paid to Observer journalist Rachel Cooke | Newspapers & magazines
A memorial service was held for journalist and critic Rachel Cooke following her death from cancer.
Cooke, 56, was diagnosed with the disease earlier this year and died on Friday. He worked at the Observer for 25 years, where he was described as “the backbone of the paper”.
Tim Adams, the current editor of the New Review supplement, said in a tribute published on the newspaper’s website: “Not only did Rachel do it all as a journalist – fearless and funny commentary, ego-piercing interviews, campaigning social reporting, insightful and exciting book reviews, flavor-inducing food writing, daring outsider reportage – but she could do it all better and faster than anyone else.”
Jane Ferguson, former editor of the New Review, added that Cooke was “full of intellectual gravitas, slightly weathered, authority, bite, humor and positive ideas.” “Even though he filed away more than 100,000 words a year for decades, he somehow still had time to read and see everything,” Ferguson added.
Journalist Sonia Sodha, a former colleague of Cooke’s at the Observer, said: “I feel very lucky to have counted Rachel Cooke as a friend and colleague in recent years.” Sodha described Cooke as a “funny, kind, intelligent, truly extraordinary writer” and a “loyal comrade in arms” to her feminist colleagues.
Guardian interviewer and feature writer Simon Hattenstone described Cooke as “a brilliant Observer journalist who could write brilliantly about anything” and added that he would be “very, very missed”.
Born in Sheffield in 1969, Cooke was the daughter of a university botany lecturer and a biology teacher. He spent part of his childhood in Jaffa, Israel, attending a Church of Scotland school where Arab and Jewish children were educated together. He studied at Oxford University before starting his journalism career at the Sunday Times. He also wrote a television column for the New Statesman.
Cooke wrote a monthly food column as part of his role at the Observer. In 2023, she published Kitchen Person, a collection of her culinary writings inspired in part by her grandmother, a working-class woman from Sunderland who was “influenced by a kind of genius in the kitchen”.
Cooke had an “emotional connection to lunch and dinner” throughout his life, Adams said. She added: “He would always roll his eyes when diets or dry Januarys were mentioned.”
Cooke is survived by her husband, the writer Anthony Quinn, with whom she lived in Islington, north London.
