Amy Crankshaw is a composer and orchestrator from South Africa, based in London, UK. Her 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 compositions are performed internationally, with commissions by Radio France, Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, South African Music Rights Organisation, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Ensemble Matters, and performances at Barbican Hall, LSO St Luke’s, La Scala Paris, Centre in the Square, Silk Street Theatre, Donald Gordon Theatre, Vorarlberg Museum, Festival Présences, ISCM World New Music Days, Festival Texte & Töne, Aix en Juin, Grahamstown National Arts Festival, and Bloomsbury Festival.

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. Amy was selected for 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, won second prize in the South African Music Rights Organisation’s Overseas Scholarship Competition for Composers in 2014, and 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 the Guildhall School of Music & Drama’s 2021 Autumn opera season, and was composer-in-residence with the London City Orchestra in 2016.

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.

Photographs (above) by Chris Willow‍ ‍