BIOGRAPHY

Amy Crankshaw’s music has been described as having “a real feeling of ecstasy” (Planet Hugill); “carrying images and sensations“ (Ôlyrix); and as “an act of love” (Opera Now). Her work is performed internationally, with commissions by Radio France, Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, South African Music Rights Organisation, Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Ensemble Matters, with performances at Barbican Hall, La Scala Paris, Centre in the Square, Silk Street Theatre, Vorarlberg Museum, Festival Présences, ISCM World New Music Days, Aix en Juin, Grahamstown National Arts Festival, and Bloomsbury Festival, among others.

Following her appointment to the LSO’s Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers’ Scheme in 2025/26, Amy has been commissioned to compose a new 10-minute piece for the LSO. The work will premiere in an upcoming concert at the Barbican Hall during the 2027/28 season. She was selected for the LSO’s 2023/24 Soundhub scheme and won the 2023/24 Richmond Concert Society’s Muriel Dawson Composition Award. She was awarded the 2015 Priaulx Rainier Prize, she won second prize in the South African Music Rights Organisation’s Overseas Scholarship Competition for Composers in 2014, and she won the South African College of Music's orchestral composition competition in 2014.

Amy has held multiple residencies with Académie du Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, including the Chamber Music Residency in 2022, and was commissioned by Festival d'Aix to co-create a site-specific chamber opera for Aix en Juin in the same year. In 2021, she was commissioned to write a new orchestration of Pauline Viardot’s salon opera Cendrillon for Guildhall School’s 2021 Autumn opera season, and was composer-in-residence with the London City Orchestra in 2016.

“Clearly Crankshaw relishes what voices can do.”
- PLANET HUGILL

Amy holds a Doctorate in Music (DMus, composition) from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Her research explored how visceral experiences of the natural world can be integrated within her compositions. She holds an MA in Opera Making & Writing from GSMD and she obtained her Master of Music and Bachelor of Music degrees in composition from the South African College of Music. During her studies, Amy received several awards for her work including the Myra Chapman Undergraduate Scholarship, the Stephanie Garnett Memorial Prize, the Meyer Levinson Prize and the EE Coutts Memorial Scholarship. She is grateful for the generous support of the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the Boltini Trust, the Guildhall School Trust, the South African Music Rights Organisation, and the South African National Research Foundation.