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Ceridwen Dovey Ceridwen Dovey i(A113321 works by)
Born: Established: 1980 Pietermaritzburg, Natal (Province), Southern Africa, Africa, ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Ceridwen Dovey was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, and attended North Sydney Girls High School.

In 1999, she left Australia for undergraduate study at Harvard, where she completed a joint degree in anthropology and visual & environmental studies. Her work included documentaries on post-apartheid South Africa, with a focus on labour relations.

Dovey spent a year as a research assistant for the current affairs program NOW with Bill Moyers after graduation, before returning to study. She wrote her novel Blood Kin as her thesis for a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town. She then obtained a PhD in anthropology from New York University.

Dovey regularly contributes non-fiction and essays to newyorker.com (The New Yorker’s website), and to The Monthly.

As of 2018, she lives in Sydney.

In 2019, she released Inner Worlds Outer Spaces, a collection of essays about the working lives of professional from euthanasia activists to rugby league players. In 2020, she won the UNSW Bragg Prize for Science Writing for 'True Grit', an article published in Wired on the unexpected problems of moondust. In 2021, she won the Bragg Prize for 'Everlasting Free-fall'.

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

2019 Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship
2017 recipient Australia Council Grants, Awards and Fellowships Literature Board Fellowship Literature Arts Projects For Individuals and Groups $40,000.00
2010 New South Wales Writer's Fellowship $20,000 to work on a collection of short stories exploring the limits of human empathy.

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Mothertongues Melbourne : Hamish Hamilton , 2022 23954630 2022 single work prose

'A genre-defying, collaborative marvel that brings the absurdity of motherhood to the page.

'After sharing their artistic frustrations at the school gate, Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell decide to take a risk- to co-write a book about early motherhood. Off-colour, offbeat, off their heads, they begin - but then, what is motherhood if not messy, non-linear, multi-authored and potty mouthed?

'What results is songs, memoir, fiction, drama, poetry, letters, pregnant and lactating AI assistants texting each other. Together, Dovey and Bell create a collage of absurd mothering, failing mothering and moving mothering. They salvage the scraps of each other's lives to imagine themselves into a future where women don't always have to choose between Art and Motherhood.

'After all- these mothers are tired. They are busy. They are lucky. They talk. Perform. Categorise. Clown. They do sad dinner cabaret. They do heroic odyssey. They do motherhood the musical. They do it badly, they do it well, they do it and they do it, and they keep on doing it as women do- comically, communally, creatively. No bells and whistles, no false cheer. Motherhood as a fever-dream fantasia, a poker-faced, tragic extravaganza.

'Funny, thoughtful, vulnerable and disturbingly familiar, Mothertongues up-ends a genre and speaks motherhood anew.' (Publication summary)

2023 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
y separately published work icon Life After Truth Sydney : Audible Studios , 2019 18253863 2019 single work novel

'Fifteen years after graduating from Harvard, five close friends on the cusp of middle age are still pursuing an elusive happiness, and wondering if they’ve wasted their youthful opportunities. Jules, already a famous actor when she arrived on campus, is changing in mysterious ways but won’t share what is haunting her. Mariam and Rowan, who married young, are struggling with the demands of family life and starting to regret prioritising meaning over wealth in their careers. Eloise, now a professor who studies the psychology of happiness, is troubled by her younger wife’s radical politics. And Jomo, founder of a luxury jewellery company, has been carrying an engagement ring around for months, unsure whether his girlfriend is the one. 

'The soul searching begins in earnest at their much-anticipated college reunion weekend on the Harvard campus, when the most infamous member of their class, Frederick - senior advisor and son of the recently elected and loathed US President - turns up dead. 

'Old friends often think they know everything about one another, but time has a way of making us strangers to those we love - and to ourselves....'   (Publication summary)

2021 longlisted Davitt Award Best Adult Crime Novel
y separately published work icon In the Garden of the Fugitives Melbourne : Penguin , 2018 12957805 2018 single work novel

'Almost twenty years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives an email from her old benefactor, Royce. Once, she was one of his brightest protégées; now her career has stalled and Royce is ailing, and each has a need to settle accounts.

'Beyond their murky shared history, both have lost beloveds, one to an untimely death, another to a strange disappearance. And both are trying to free themselves from deeper pasts, Vita from the inheritance of her birthplace, Royce from the grip of the ancient city of Pompeii and the secrets of the Garden of the Fugitives. Between what’s been repressed and what has been excavated are disturbances that reach back through decades, even centuries.

'Addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a masterpiece of duplicity and counterplay, as brilliantly illuminating as it is surprising – about the obscure workings of guilt in the human psyche, the compulsion to create, and the dangerous morphing of desire into control. It is the breakthrough work of one of Australia’s most exciting emerging writers'. (Publication summary)

2019 longlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Australian Literary Fiction Book of the Year
Last amended 15 Dec 2021 12:28:58
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