Ceridwen Dovey

Ceridwen Dovey (born 1980) is a South African and Australian social anthropologist and author. In 2009 she was named a 5 under 35 nominee by the National Book Foundation[1] and in 2020 won The Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing.[2]

Ceridwen Dovey
Born1980 (age 40–41)
Pietermaritzburg, South Africa
OccupationNovelist
NationalitySouth Africa, Australia
Period2008-present
Website
ceridwendovey.com

Early years and education

Dovey was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, and grew up between South Africa and Australia. Her parents derived her 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 labourers in post-apartheid South Africa. She made a documentary about wine farm labour relations in the Western Cape of South Africa, Aftertaste, as part of her honors thesis.

Career

In 2004 Dovey worked briefly for the television programme NOW with Bill Moyers at Channel Thirteen in New York City before moving 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, then did her graduate studies in Social Anthropology at New York University. She moved back to Sydney, Australia in 2010. From 2010 to 2015 she worked for the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney. She writes non-fiction for various publications, including newyorker.com and The Monthly.

Works

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 was published in fifteen countries, including Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden. It was shortlisted in 2007 for the Dylan Thomas Prize and 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.[3] It won the inaugural 2014 Readings New Australian Writing Award and the People's Choice for Fiction Award (joint with Joan London's The Golden Age) at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, as well as the Queensland Literary Awards Steele Rudd Award for a short story collection.

Dovey's third novel, In the Garden of the Fugitives, was published in early 2018.[4]

Writers on Writers: Ceridwen Dovey on J.M. Coetzee was published in October 2018 as part of Black Inc.'s Writers on Writers series.

Life After Truth is Dovey's fourth novel and was published in November 2020.[5]

Personal life

She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband, Blake Munting, and two children. Her parents live in Sydney and her sister, Lindiwe Dovey, is a senior lecturer in African Screen Media at SOAS in London.

Publications
  • Dovey, Ceridwen (2007), Blood Kin, Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-657-3[6][7][8][9]
  • Dovey, Ceridwen (2014), Only the Animals, Melbourne, Victoria Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin books, ISBN 978-1-926428-58-1[10]
  • Dovey, Ceridwen (2018), In the Garden of the Fugitives, Hamish Hamilton, ISBN 978-1-926428-59-8[11]
  • Dovey, Ceridwen (2020), Life After Truth, Hamish Hamilton, ISBN 978-1-76089-536-5

Awards

References
  1. "5 Under 35 Archives". Retrieved 26 November 2020.
  2. "Dovey wins 2020 Bragg Prize for Science Writing". Books+Publishing. 26 November 2020. Retrieved 26 November 2020.
  3. Romei, Stephen. "Burden of the beasts". The Australian. Retrieved 21 December 2014.
  4. Walsh, S. Kirk (31 August 2018). "'In the Garden of the Fugitives': A Literary Tale of Love and Obsession (Published 2018)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 26 November 2020.
  5. "Life After Truth by Ceridwen Dovey review – lifestyles of the remarkably privileged". The Guardian. 12 November 2020. Retrieved 26 November 2020.
  6. Nicole Rudick, "Blood Kin" (review), Bookforum, February 2008. Retrieved 21 February 2008
  7. "New Fiction, New Worlds", Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 21 February 2008
  8. Catherine Taylor, "Languour management" (review of Blood Kin), The Guardian, 21 July 2007. Retrieved 21 February 2008
  9. Review of Blood Kin, Litnet. Retrieved 21 February 2008
  10. Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey, Book Review, Booklover Book Reviews - 6 February 2015
  11. Rebecca Starford, "The Garden of the Fugitives review: Ceridwen Dovey's striking, intelligent novel" Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 8 April 2018
  12. "2020 Australian Museum Eureka Prize winners". The Australian Museum. Retrieved 9 December 2020.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.