Ceridwen Dovey

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

Biography

Dovey was born in Pietermaritzburg, 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 novel set in Wales, How Green Was My Valley. Dovey attended high school in Australia at North Sydney Girls High School, before going 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 .

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.

Work

Dovey's first novel, Blood Kin 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, the Netherlands, 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.

Dovey's second book, Only the Animals is a collection of ten short stories about the souls of ten animals caught up in human conflicts over the last century and tells their stories of life and death.^[1]

Novels

• Blood Kin (2008) ISBN 0-670-01856-2
• Only the Animals (2014) ISBN 978-1-926-42858-1

References

• Ceridwen Dovey's author website. Accessed 21 February 2008
• Nicole Rudick, "Blood Kin" (review), Bookforum, February 2008. Accessed 21 February 2008
• In conversation with Ceridwen Dovey, author of Blood Kin Accessed 21 February 2008
• "New Fiction, New Worlds", Publishers Weekly. Accessed 21 February 2008
• Catherine Taylor, "Languour management" (review of Blood Kin), The Guardian, 21 July 2007. Accessed 21 February 2008
• Review of Blood Kin, Litnet. Accessed 21 February 2008
• "Graduate Student’s Debut Novel Knows No Cultural Bounds". Accessed 14 February 2008
• "Aftertaste by Ceridwen Dovey", Documentary Educational Resources. . Accessed 14 February 2008]
• Mail & Guardian South Africa review. Accessed 21 February 2008
• "African studies hands out awards", UCT News, Volume 24.10, 16 May 2005. Accessed 14 February 2008
• Ceridwen Dovey: "The darkness of my golden years", Yje Independent, 18 November 2007. Accessed 14 February 2008

External links

• The Ceridwen Dovey official shelf page on Book Southern Africa
• Ceridwen Dovey's website
• "Q & A with Ceridwen Dovey", Penguin Books Australia. 2014