Amanda Craig

Who is Amanda Craig?

Amanda Craig is a British novelist and journalist.

Craig studied at Bedales School and Cambridge and works as a journalist.

Craig has so far published a cycle of six novels which deal with contemporary British society, often in a concise, acerbic, false and satirical manner. Her approach to writing fiction has been compared to that of Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens. Her 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, a literary critic and former boyfriend of Craig's at Cambridge, fifteen years previously. The novel was promptly 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. Usually, Craig takes a minor character and makes him or her the protagonist of her next work.

Craig is particularly interested in children's fiction, and was one of the first critics to praise J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman in The New Statesman. She was formerly the children's critic for The Times.

In a Daily Mail opinion piece, Craig criticised the anti-gender stereotyping campaign, Pinkstinks. She confessed to hating pink, but argued that "you can't 'liberate' young girls by banning it. Besides, if you banned pink, there would be a toddlers' revolution. It speaks to their deepest instincts of what is feminine".