Amanda Craig

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 University. After graduation, Craig worked briefly in advertising for J. Walter Thompson and Terence Conran before becoming a journalist and novelist.

Journalism

For ten years, she was the children's books critic for The Times. She contributes regularly 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.

Novels

Craig has written a cycle of seven interconnected novels which deal with contemporary British society, often in an expansive, dramatic and satirical manner. Her multi-stranded approach to writing fiction has been compared to that of Anthony Trollope, Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens.

Her 1996 novel A Vicious Circle was originally contracted to be published by Hamish Hamilton, but was cancelled when its proof copy received a libel threat from David Sexton, currently the literary editor of the Evening Standard and former boyfriend of Craig's at Cambridge, fifteen years previously. The novel was promptly bought by Fourth Estate and published three months later. It is currently being developed as a TV series for Channel 4 by Sharon Maguire, director of Bridget Jones's Baby.

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 AN Wilson as "the greatest novelist under fifty" and by Allison Pearson in the Sunday Telegraph, saying "she has everything you look for in a major writer: 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."

Her fourth novel In a Dark Wood concerned the interplay between fairy-tales and manic depression, and her fifth, Love in Idleness updates Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, setting it 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 long-listed for the 2009 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Her seventh novel The Lie of the Land (2017), concerned with 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, commenting "It seems strange that none of Craig's books have been adapted for TV, and the medium is one to which The Lie of the Land would be well suited. 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 Book At Bedtime in August 2017.

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

Craig has set two of her novels A Private Place and The Lie of the Land in Devon, a county which she has compared to C. S. Lewis's Narnia.

Craig is particularly interested in fairy-tales and children's fiction, and was one of the first critics to praise J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman in the New Statesman. As children's critic of The Times she was the first to praise Cressida Cowell, Stephenie Meyer and Suzanne Collins.

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".

Personal life

Craig is married to British economist Robin Cohen with two children and lives in London and Devon.

Books

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 a 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 a short story "Metamorphosis 2" about a celebrity inspired by Katie Hopkins who transforms into a gigantic cockroach to an anthology "A Country of Refuge" supporting refugees.