Ceridwen Dovey was born in 1980 in South Africa. She is and African and Australian social anthropologist and author. She studied 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 laborers in post-apartheid South Africa. She made a documentary about wine farm labor relations in the Western Cape of South Africa, Aftertaste, as part of her Honors thesis, which is distributed by John Marshall's Documentary Educational Resources.
In 2004 Dovey worked briefly for the television programme NOW with Bill Moyers at Channel Thirteen in New York before returning 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. Dovey's first novel, Blood Kin was published by Atlantic Books (U.K.) and by Viking in North America in March 2008. It was shortlisted in 2007 for 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). 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 and tells their stories of life and death. It was the inaugural winner of the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction in 2014 and it was shortlisted for an ABIA Award in 2015 in the Matt Richell New Writer category. This title also shared in the 2015 NSW Premier's People Choice Award along with The Golden Age by Joan London.
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