Amanda Craig (born 1959) is a British novelist, critic and journalist. She was a recipient of the Catherine Pakenham Award. 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 becoming a journalist and novelist. Writing Journalism For ten years, she was the children's books critic for The 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 had judged numerous literary prizes including 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 eight interconnected novels dealing with contemporary British society, often in an expansive, dramatic and satirical manner that has made her a leading proponent of the social novel. 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, 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. A Vicious Circle was praised by the critic A.N. Wilson in the Evening Standard as, "A love story and political comment, a defence of the art of fiction, a masterpiece". Although each novel can be read separately, they are linked to each other by