Ceridwen Dovey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ceridwen Dovey
Born 1980
South Africa
Occupation Novelist and graduate student in Social Anthropology at NYU
Nationality Flag of South Africa South Africa,
Flag of Australia Australia
Writing period 2008-present
Influences
Official website

Ceridwen Dovey (born 1980) is a South African and Australian social anthropologist and author.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Dovey was born in South Africa and grew up between South Africa and Australia. Her parents derived her unusual name from one of the protagonists in Richard Llewellyn's 1939 Welsh novel, How Green Was My Valley. Dovey attended high school in Australia at North Sydney Girls High before coming to the United States in 1999 to study at Harvard University as an undergraduate where she completed a joint degree in Anthropology and Visual & Environmental Studies in 2003. During her time at Harvard, Dovey made documentaries that highlighted the relationships between farmers and rural laborers in post-apartheid South Africa. She made a documentary about wine farm labor relations in the Western Cape of South Africa, Aftertaste, as part of her Honors thesis, which is distributed by John Marshall's Documentary Educational Resources [1].

In 2004 Dovey worked briefly for the television programme NOW with Bill Moyers at Channel Thirteen in New York before returning to South Africa to study creative writing at the University of Cape Town. She wrote her first novel Blood Kin as her thesis for an MA in creative writing under the supervision of poet Stephen Watson. She now lives in New York City. Her parents live in Sydney and her sister, Lindiwe Dovey, is a lecturer in African Cinema at SOAS in London.

[edit] Work

Dovey's first novel, Blood Kin: A Novel was published by Atlantic Books (U.K.), Penguin (South Africa) and Penguin (Australia) in July 2007, and by Viking in North America in March 2008. It will be published in a total of fourteen countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Holland, and Sweden. It was shortlisted in 2007 for the U.K.'s John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for British/Commonwealth authors under the age of 35, and was shortlisted in 2008 for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Africa). It tells the story of a fictional military coup from the perspective of the overthrown leader’s portraitist, chef, and barber. The novel is deliberately ambiguous in its setting.

[edit] Novels

[edit] References

  • Ceridwen Dovey's author website [2] Accessed February 21, 2008
  • Bookforum review of Blood Kin [3] Accessed February 21, 2008
  • In conversation with Ceridwen Dovey, author of Blood Kin [4] Accessed February 21, 2008
  • Publishers Weekly New Fiction, New Worlds [5] Accessed February 21, 2008
  • Guardian review of Blood Kin [6] Accessed February 21, 2008
  • LitNet's review of Blood Kin [7] Accessed February 21, 2008
  • Graduate Student’s Debut Novel Knows No Cultural Bounds [8] Accessed February 14, 2008
  • Documentary Educational Resources [9] Accessed February 14, 2008
  • Mail & Guardian South Africa review [10] Accessed February 21, 2008
  • UCT News [11] Accessed February 14, 2008
  • Ceridwen Dovey: The darkness of my golden years [12] Accessed February 14, 2008
Languages