Amanda Lees

Amanda was born in Hong Kong and survived both a convent boarding school and a Jesuit boys’ school before being summarily ejected from the latter. She gets her thirst for adventure from her parents who met in the jungle in Borneo where her mother had set up a hospital and her father, a former Gurkha Intelligence officer and Oxford-educated spy, was probably up to no good.
The Silence Before Dawn, the first in her bestselling WW2 thriller series was published in September 2022 and the second, Paris At First Light, in November 2022, both also to excellent reviews. The third book in the series, The Midwife’s Child, was published in May 2023 and the latest, The Paris Spy’s Girl, in February 2024. All of these can be read as standalones. The fifth book in the series, If I Can Save One Child, will be published in July 2024. She was elected to the board of the Crime Writers Association in 2024.
Amanda is also the author of the bestselling satirical novels Selling Out and Secret Admirer (published by Pan) which have both received critical acclaim and have been translated into several languages. Her major YA thriller trilogy, Kumari, Goddess of Gotham, was written as a tribute to her mum, who died a couple of months before
In creating Kumari, Amanda wanted to write books for young people that would reflect her own exotic childhood. Kumari was nominated for the Guardian Children’s Book Prize and the Doncaster Book Award. It featured as Redhouse Book Of The Month and Lovereading4kids Book Of The Month.
Amanda has a degree in drama and her first telly job was as a member of the Communist Resistance in ’Allo ‘Allo. This involved running around with a dachshund tucked under one arm and deploying her best cod French accent. It has all been dramatically downhill since although the experience proved invaluable for her WW2 series.
A broadcaster as well as an actress and novelist, Amanda appears regularly on BBC radio and LBC and was a contracted writer to the hit series Weekending on Radio 4. She researched and edited the leading directory for banks, The Banker’s Almanac, for Euromoney publications while also covering stories of shady dealings in the City for them.
She has written for, or contributed to, The Evening Standard, The Times, New Woman, US Cosmopolitan, Bulgaria’s Vagabond and Company Magazine as well as numerous online publications and has two non-fiction books published under a pen name.
Her non-fiction book under her own name, From Aconite to the Zodiac Killer: The Dictionary of Crime, was published by Robinson/Little Brown in July 2020 to excellent reviews. It was published in the US by Ulysses Press in May 2021.
As well as Eastern European Mafiosi and the ex-head of the KGB, Amanda numbers serving and retired Police Officers, FBI agents, members of the Special Forces and distinguished forensic scientists among her dubious but well-qualified contacts.
Amanda has conducted a love coaching phone-in from the sofa of Richard & Judy and wooed the viewers on Channel 5 Live. She won an award at the Hungarian Gyor Film Festival for a short film she produced, a psychological thriller called Pros and Cons.
She is currently working on a number of book, TV and film projects including a psychological thriller and a spy series.