AustLit

(Publication abstract)

'Ceridwen Dovey writes fiction, creative non-fiction, and in-depth essays and profiles. Born in South Africa, she grew up between South Africa and Australia, went to Harvard University on scholarship as an undergraduate, and did her postgraduate studies in social anthropology at New York University.

'Her debut novel, Blood Kin, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award and selected for the U.S. National Book Foundation’s prestigious "5 Under 35" honours list.

'Her second book, Only the Animals, won the inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award, the Steele Rudd Award for a short story collection in the Queensland Literary Awards, and was co-winner of the People's Choice Award for Fiction at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards.

'Her 2018 novel, In the Garden of the Fugitives was longlisted for the 2019 ABIA Awards. Life After Truth, published in 2020, is her latest work.' (Production introduction)

'In the Garden of the Fugitives is Ceridwen Dovey’s second novel, and her third book-length publication. Her debut Blood Kin was published in 2007, followed in 2014 by the short story collection Only the Animals. These three very different works, each with their layers of interwoven stories, voices now in concert, now in conflict, attest to the originality of Dovey’s conceptually complex writing.' (Introduction)

'While reading fiction as little more than smuggled autobiography is an inherently crass and undergraduate approach to literary criticism, I’d nonetheless like to start that way. I have, after all, something close to the author’s permission. Pondering the lacerations of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle in these pages only a few years ago, Ceridwen Dovey, in an essay titled “The Pencil and the Damage Done”, wrote:

'I kept being distracted by my own horror at what Knausgaard was doing, slashing away at his world, and by the overwhelming feeling that it would cost him too much as a human being. I googled his wife, his uncle, his mother, even his children, fixating on the walking wounded surrounding the living author.

'Upon reading Dovey’s new novel, In the Garden of the Fugitives (Hamish Hamilton; $32.99), I, too, googled, and under the “Early Years and Education” subheading of her Wikipedia page found a life story remarkably similar to that of the novel’s central character, Vita. The childhood in South Africa and Australia, the schooling at Harvard, the early career in filmmaking. All there, all echoing unignorably. The living author was insisting upon conflation with a fictional creation.' (Introduction)

'I was never brave enough to visit Pompeii, partly due to an overactive imagination that combined a sense of the ferocity of Vesuvius’s blast in 79 CE and the volcano’s ongoing muttering with thoughts of the city’s Roman residents, cauterised in the eruption: outstretched hands; a dog expiring mid-roll; a mother and her child.' (Introduction)