He taught English for four years in Huddersfield, before joining Friends' School in Great Ayton, North Yorkshire.
Kindled by Rushforth's interest in the Holocaust, and in particular his discovery of a cache of pre-war letters from Jewish parents pleading for their children's safe passage, Kindergarten was a short and disturbing novel, a grim reworking of the fable of Hansel and Gretel from the canon of the Brothers Grimm.
The Hawthornden, awarded annually for the "best work of imaginative literature", was particularly appropriate for the non-Jewish Rushforth who had written persuasively about the Holocaust.
Pinkerton's Sister (2004), a vast and dense novel, over 700 pages compressed into a single day, described the fantastic inner life of Alice Pinkerton, a brilliant spinster who is regarded as somewhat crazy by the turn-of-the-century New York City society around her, but who lives in her own, richly-detailed world of literature, fertile with allusions to Shakespeare, Wilde, Poe, Whitman, Stevenson, Tennyson, Austen, and many others.
Its subject matter and style – stream-of-consciousness narrative over a single day, packed with literary references, and producing a panoramic portrait of a society – even led some critics to draw parallels to James Joyce's great novel Ulysses.