She won the 1990 Carnegie Medal for Wolf and the 1992 Whitbread Children's Book Award for The Great Elephant Chase.
The same year, she also completed The Dark Behind the Curtain, a horror story illustrated by David Parkins and published by Oxford University Press.
[3] It was highly commended for the 1982 Carnegie Medal[4][a] from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.
[citation needed] In early 2014, she became a patron for the Leamington Spa-based charity Cord, after their work in Sudan inspired her latest novel, After Tomorrow.
[7] Three of Cross's books are Junior Library Guild selections: The Great American Elephant Chase (1995),[8] New World (1995),[9] and Pictures in the Dark (1997).