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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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Works By

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1 y separately published work icon Only the Astronauts Ceridwen Dovey , Camberwell : Hamish Hamilton , 2024 27539640 2024 selected work short story 'Adrift in outer space, a motley crew of human-made objects tell their tales, making real history sweeter and stranger. Starman, a lovelorn mannequin orbiting the Sun in his cherry-red car, pines for his creator. The first sculpture ever taken to the Moon is possessed by the spirit of Neil Armstrong. The International Space Station, awaiting deorbit and burial in a spacecraft cemetery beneath the ocean, farewells its last astronauts. A team of tamponauts sets off on a perilous mission to Mars inspired by the courage of their predecessors. The Voyager 1 space probe, carrying its precious Golden Record, is captured by Oortians near the edge of the solar system and drawn into their baroque, glimmering rituals. By turns joyous and mournful, these object-astronauts are not high priests of the universe but something a little, weirder. From their inverted perspectives, they observe humans both intimately and from a great distance, bearing witness to a civilisation unable to live up to its own ideals. And yet each still finds in our planet, in their humans, something worthy of love.' 

(Publication summary)

1 Writing the Inner Lives of Space Objects Ceridwen Dovey , 2022 single work essay
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , November 2022;

'How do we imagine the inner lives of inanimate objects? Fascinated by stories of objects sent into space, I began to use fictional, speculative and experimental modes of writing to look back at humanity and blur the lines between hard science and human emotion.' (Introduction)   

1 7 y separately published work icon Mothertongues Eliza Bell , Ceridwen Dovey , 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)

1 form y separately published work icon Moonrise Ceridwen Dovey , ( dir. Rowena Potts ) Australia : 2021 21861070 2021 single work film/TV

'Based on an original poem by award-winning Australian author Ceridwen Dovey, Moonrise is a striking, surreal montage of historical, artistic and scientific lunar imagery that invites us to consider the Moon's point of view in the face of increasingly exploitative human activity in space.'

Source: St Kilda Film Festival.

1 y separately published work icon Once More with Feeling Ceridwen Dovey , Sydney : Audible Studios , 2020 20296538 2020 single work novel

'Arthur MacDonald, 85, is having an end-of-life crisis. His beloved, dying wife of over 60 years no longer knows who he is. His older brother still has all his hair and a wife almost half his age. The man his middle-aged daughter is dating has a ponytail. 

'His teenaged grandson wants to cook desserts for a living. And his daughter wants him to move into Silvermine retirement home. Then Arthur meets the gorgeous, radical, 80-something-year-old Robbie and learns that nobody is ever too old to fall in love all over again.' (Publcation summary)

1 And so to Bed Ceridwen Dovey , Eliza Bell , 2020 single work short story
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 27 June - 3 July 2020;
2 6 y separately published work icon Life After Truth Ceridwen Dovey , 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)

1 Bad Moon Rising : It's Finders Keepers in the New Space Race Ceridwen Dovey , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: The Monthly , July no. 157 2019; (p. 34-43)

'The article reports on competition in countries regarding moon exploration as countries such as the U.S. India, South Korea and Japan will send up robotic spacecraft in the next few years. It mentions that writer Tim Winton lamented the "quarry mentality" that leads to short-sighted decisions on Earth, such as the proposal to establish a beach-head for mining operations within Western Australia's World Heritage–listed Ningaloo Marine Park.' (Publication abstract)

1 The A Factor Ceridwen Dovey , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: The Monthly , June no. 156 2019; (p. 18-19)
'A personal narrative is presented in which the author shares her experience of spending time with Jane Allen and Jesse Blackadder, television drama writers, at a television drama set at Mawson station in Antarctica.'  (Publication abstract)
1 The Alluring World of Liane Moriarty Ceridwen Dovey , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: The Monthly , October no. 149 2018; (p. 46-55)

'You know you've read a great book when it changes how you move through the world. That's how I felt after reading Big Little Lies, Australian author Liane Moriarty's sixth and best-known novel (thanks in part to its adaptation as an award-winning HBO TV series starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman). Moriarty's creative genius in this book, as in all her work, is to scrutinise a group of ordinary people forced to co-exist in an emotionally and morally charged situation. ' (Introduction)
 

1 3 y separately published work icon Ceridwen Dovey on J.M. Coetzee Ceridwen Dovey , Collingwood : Black Inc. , 2018 13766901 2018 single work essay

'For Ceridwen Dovey, J.M. Coetzee ‘has always been there, an unseen but strongly felt presence in our small family drama’. As a child, she observed with fascination her mother’s immersion in Coetzee’s writing as she worked on what would become the first critical study of his early novels.

'Even now, as a writer herself, Ceridwen’s relationship with Coetzee’s books is still mediated by her mother’s readings of them: to get to him, she must first step through her mother’s formidable mind. With tenderness and insight, Dovey draws on this personal history to explore the Nobel Prize-winner’s work – how his books ‘do theory’ on themselves – while also tracing the intellectual heritage that has been passed from mother to daughter.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

2 7 y separately published work icon In the Garden of the Fugitives Ceridwen Dovey , 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)

1 The Mapping of Massacres Ceridwen Dovey , 2017 single work column
— Appears in: The New Yorker , 6 December 2017;

'From New York to Cape Town to Sydney, the bronze body doubles of the white men of empire—Columbus, Rhodes, Cook—have lately been pelted with feces, sprayed with graffiti, had their hands painted red. Some have been toppled. The fate of these statues—and those representing white men of a different era, in Charlottesville and elsewhere—has ignited debate about the political act of publicly memorializing historical figures responsible for atrocities. But when the statues come down, how might the atrocities themselves be publicly commemorated, rather than repressed?'  (Introduction)

1 A Wedding on the Breede Ceridwen Dovey , 2016 single work short story
— Appears in: Southern Review , Summer vol. 52 no. 3 2016; (p. 340-349)
1 Fixations Ceridwen Dovey , 2016 single work short story
— Appears in: Sex and Death : Stories 2016;
1 Midnight in Mozambique Ceridwen Dovey , 2015 single work prose
— Appears in: Out of Place : Prose Poems and Microfiction 2015; (p. 27)
1 Introduction Ceridwen Dovey , 2015 single work essay
— Appears in: Strange Objects Covered with Fur : 2015 UTS Writers Anthology 2015; (p. ix-xi)
1 Art for the Nose Ceridwen Dovey , 2015 single work short story
— Appears in: The Monthly , June no. 112 2015; (p. 14-17)
1 The Pencil and the Damage Done Ceridwen Dovey , 2014 single work essay
— Appears in: The Monthly , November no. 106 2014; (p. 42-45) The Best Australian Essays 2015 2015;
1 Our Only and Most Loyal Spectators Ceridwen Dovey , 2014 extract novel (Only the Animals)
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 19-20 April 2014;
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