Ceridwen Dovey

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, 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 Ceridwen Dovey was born in 1980 in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa,

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. and then 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. 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.

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.

In 2024 she published a collection of short stories called Only the Astronauts, in which the narrator in each story is an inanimate object in space, including the International Space Station and Voyager 1 spacecraft.

Dovey writes non-fiction for various publications, including The New Yorker and The Monthly.

Personal life Dovey's sister, Lindiwe Dovey, is Professor of Film and Screen Studies at SOAS University of London.