Amanda Craig

Amanda Craig (born 1959) is a British novelist, critic and journalist.

Early life

Born in South Africa, Craig grew up in Italy before moving to London. Her parents were British journalist, author and UN Press Officer Dennis Craig and South African journalist Zelda Wolhuter, who left Johannesburg following the Sharpeville Massacre and the rise of apartheid. Craig studied at Bedales School and read English Literature at Clare College, Cambridge. After graduation, she worked briefly in advertising for J. Walter Thompson and Terence Conran before leaving to work as a cleaner for 18 months. She then became a journalist.

Writing

;Journalism
For ten years, she was the children's books critic for ''The Times'' and a features writer for ''The Sunday Times''. She has contributed to ''The Observer'', ''The Guardian'', the ''New Statesman'' and BBC Radio 4. As a journalist, Craig won the British Press Awards 1995 Young Journalist of the Year and the 1997 Catherine Pakenham Award. She worked on the staff of ''Tatler'' and the ''Sunday Express'' before becoming a freelance feature writer, literary critic and columnist for ''The Daily Telegraph'', ''The Sunday Times'', the ''Daily Mail'', ''The Independent'', and ''The Observer''. She judged the Whitbread Novel Award in 2005, the Booktrust Teen Book Award in 2008, and the 2018 Wingate Prize. Craig was dropped as a judge for the Mslexia Fiction & Memoir Competition by women’s writing magazine '' Mslexia'' in September 2020 after she signed a letter to ''The Times'' condemning online abuse of J.K. Rowling.

;Novels
Craig has written a cycle of nine interconnected novels dealing with contemporary British society. Her 1996 novel ''A Vicious Circle'' was originally contracted to be published by Hamish Hamilton, but was cancelled after a libel threat from David Sexton, literary editor of the ''Evening Standard'' and former boyfriend of Craig's at Cambridge, fifteen years previously. The novel was bought by Fourth Estate and published three months later.

Although each novel can be read separately, they are linked to each other by common characters and themes, thus constituting a novel sequence. Craig has been cited as a state-of-the-nation novelist by Sameer Rahim in '' Prospect'' and by ''The Sunday Times''. Usually, Craig takes a minor character and makes him or her the protagonist of her next work. She has been praised by Allison Pearson in ''The Sunday Telegraph'' for her "...wit, indignation, an ear for the telling phrase and an unflagging attention to all the individual choices by which we define ourselves – where we stand as a society and how we decline and fall."

Craig's fourth novel, ''In a Dark Wood'', concerned the interplay between fairytales and manic depression, and her fifth, ''Love in Idleness'', updates Shakespeare's ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'', setting the story in a holiday villa near Cortona, Italy. Her sixth novel, ''Hearts and Minds'', concerned with the lives of legal and illegal immigrants in London, was longlisted for the 2009 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Her seventh novel, ''The Lie of the Land'' (2017), depicted a London professional couple who can't afford to divorce and move to Devon to a rented house which has been the scene of a murder, was cited as "in the vanguard of the Brexit novel" by Danuta Kean in ''The Guardian''. It was praised by Henry Hitchings in the ''Financial Times'', who commented: "An enjoyable, sharp-witted and at times knowingly melodramatic novel, it lives up to the promise of its title – diagnosing the state of the nation without becoming grandiose, and debunking a few quaint myths about the patterns and textures of rural life." It was BBC Radio 4's ''Book at Bedtime'' in August 2017. ''The Guardian'' chose it as one of the 2017 Books of the Year, as did ''The Irish Times'', ''The Financial Times'', ''The Observer'', and ''The Telegraph''.

Craig has set two of her novels, ''A Private Place'' and ''The Lie of the Land'', in Devon, a county that she has compared to C. S. Lewis's Narnia. In an interview with Jackie McGlone of ''The Glasgow Herald,'' Craig described how encountering the poverty of North Devon shocked her. Her eighth novel, ''The Golden Rule,'' was published in 2020 and was described as a "wry comedy-cum-thriller reimagining of Patricia Highsmith ''Strangers on a Train'' and ''Beauty and the Beast''", "offering comfort and wit, compassion and philosophical speculation," although one critic commented of the millennial protagonist: "Craig’s language choices... make her seem weirdly prim. ''The Golden Rule'' was longlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for fiction. Her ninth novel was ''The Three Graces'' (2023), described by ''The Telegraph'' as "smartly plotted but ultimately lightweight."

Craig is interested in fairytales and children's fiction, and was one of the first critics to praise J. K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, Cressida Cowell, Stephenie Meyer, Anthony Horowitz, Malorie Blackman and Suzanne Collins.

Craig gav
the annual Trollope Society lecture in 2022
an
the 2023 Dorothy L Sayers lecture, published in the Daily Telegraph
stating that both had influenced her novels and her life-choices.

Following her struggle to get ''A Vicious Circle'' published, she became an active campaigner with International PEN for the reform of UK libel laws.

In an opinion piece in ''The Independent'', Craig asked why fiction remains obsessed by historical fiction and neglects the contemporary, saying she has "set out to take the DNA of a Victorian novel – its spirit of realism, its strong plot, its cast of characters who are not passively shaped by circumstances but who rise to challenges or escape them." She has said in interviews that she considers writing contemporary fiction to be "a moral duty".

;Other
Craig's short stories have been published in ''Good Housekeeping'', ''The Mail on Sunday'', the ''Sunday Express'', the ''New Statesman'' and collections such as Valentine's Day ''Duckworth'' and ''Good Housekeeping'' ''Great Escapes'' in support of Childline.

In 2011, she contributed the short story "Red Berries" to an anthology supporting the Woodland Trust. The anthology, ''Why Willows Weep'', has so far helped the Woodland Trust plant approximately 50,000 trees, and was re-released in paperback format in 2016. In 2017 she contributed the short story "Metamorphosis 2" about a celebrity inspired by Katie Hopkins who transforms into a gigantic cockroach to the anthology ''A Country of Refuge'' supporting refugees.

She has written forewords for the 2021 Abacus reissues of 5 novels by Beryl Bainbridge - ''Every Man For Himself'', ''Master Georgie'', ''The Birthday Boys'', ''According to Queenie'' and ''The Bottle Factory Outing'', 2 novels by Eva Ibbotson - ''The Secret Countess'' and ''A Glove Shop In Vienna'', reissued by Macmillan - plus Alison Lurie's Pulitzer Prize-winning ''Foreign Affairs''.

Adaptations

In 2023, it was announced that the rights to ''The Three Graces'' had been optioned by television company Monumental Television.

Personal life

Craig is married to British economist Rob Cohen, with whom she has two children. She lives in London and Devon.

Bibliography

Books

*
* ''A Private Place'' (1991), Hutchinson
* ''A Vicious Circle'' (1996), 4th Estate
* ''In a Dark Wood'' (2000), 4th Estate
* ''Love in Idleness'' (2003), Little, Brown UK
* ''Hearts and Minds'' (2009), Little, Brown UK
* ''The Other Side of You'' (novella) (2017), Little, Brown UK
* ''The Lie of the Land'' (2017), Little, Brown UK
* ''The Golden Rule'' (2020), Little, Brown UK
* ''The Three Graces'' (2023), Little, Brown UK

References

External links

*

Audio slideshow interview with Amanda Craig
on The Interview Online

{{DEFAULTSORT:Craig, Amanda
1959 births
Living people
20th-century British novelists
21st-century British novelists
Children's literature criticism
People educated at Bedales School
Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge
English women novelists
21st-century British short story writers
Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
Jewish English writers
21st-century English women writers
20th-century English women writers
20th-century English writers
New Statesman people