Ceridwen Dovey (born 1980) is a South African and Australian author and social anthropologist. The winner of several awards, she is known for her first novel, Blood Kin (2007), and her 2014 short story collection, Only the Animals. In 2024 she published another collection of short stories, called Only the Astronauts.
Early years and education
Dovey was born in 1980 in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa,[1] and grew up between South Africa (mainly East London) and Australia. Her father received death threats because he taught black students, then illegal under the apartheid regime.[2]
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,[1] called Aftertaste, as part of her honours thesis in 2003.[2]
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 15 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.[3]