15 Questions with Ceridwen Dovey
Ceridwen Dovey ’03 has found herself on the shortlist for one of the highest honors that a young writer can receive: the Dylan Thomas Prize, one of the world’s highest-paying literary awards. But Dovey, who spent her college years immersed in film and farms rather than fiction, is certainly not the stereotypical writer-prodigy. The budding author took some time to chat with FM about her past exploits and present pursuits.
1. Fifteen Minutes (FM): With that accent of yours, you can’t be a Boston native. Where are you from?
Ceridwen Dovey (CD): That’s a long, messy story. I grew up in Australia and South Africa. My family moved back and forth between the years of 1982 and 1987 about three times. After ’87, we stayed in South Africa, but I later attended high school in Australia at an all-girls school.
2. FM: You went to an all-girls school for high school?
CD: All my life before Harvard, actually, yeah.
3. FM: Well then, besides the obvious allure of our strapping male population, what brought you to Harvard in the first place?
CD: My older sister applied to Harvard on a whim and got in, and then off she went. She’d never been to America before. When I applied two years later, I hadn’t been to America before either, but at least I had her to guide me through the process.
4. FM: How did you prepare for Harvard?
CD: In Australia, high school finishes in December, but I was going to start the school year in September, so I had nine months to myself. I went to London and worked as a secretary and saved my money, and then I drove a camper van around Europe for two months before I went to Harvard.
5. FM: What was your concentration?
CD: I was a joint concentrator in Social Anthropology and Visual and Environmental Studies.
6. FM: Not your typical pre-professional route.
CD: My sister was very interested in fiction film and she was already a joint English and VES major. I was more interested in documentary film, and anthropology was a way to do both because I could do a thesis project that was complementary to both fields. They let me do a documentary film based on farm work in South Africa and my written thesis for anthropology was about black empowerment in South Africa.
7. FM: Did you always know you’d be an artist?
CD: I always knew I would do something creative. I would be no good at any of the other things. I’m just hopeless at science—it was just a question of how I would cobble the various disciplines together.
8. FM: “Aftertaste,” your senior thesis, has been screened at film festivals around the world. What inspired you to write a documentary about post-Apartheid farming in South Africa?
CD: Near Cape Town there are a lot of wine farms. During my senior year there were a lot of farmers starting “empowerment projects.” Basically this meant that for the first time the workers could own parts of the vineyard and make profits from their wine being sold in Europe and America. I wanted to see if it was working, and since it was also an anthropological project I wanted to live on the farm and see what it was like. So I did all the field work and then I edited that footage over the course of my senior year. That turned out to be my film.
9. FM: After the success of “Aftertaste,” what made you turn from film to creative writing?
CD: After a year working in New York, I went back to Cape Town and studied for two years. I thought I was going back to keep making documentaries but for a variety of reasons that didn’t work out well at all, so I applied for a creative writing Master’s at the University of Cape Town.
10. FM: Your novel, “Blood Kin,” describes a corrupt political regime through the eyes of multiple narrators. Where did this story come from?
CD: I had a film idea to do a portrait of the South African president, Thabo Mbeki. He’s quite an enigmatic political figure, he’s seen as quite distant from the population, and I thought I might be distinct by doing portraits of three men who worked close to him in a non-political capacity. But I couldn’t afford my own camera, I had no way of getting in touch with the president of the country, and I didn’t even know if he had a butcher or a barber, so I abandoned the film idea. [Editor’s note: Mbeki resigned the South African presidency effective today, September 25.]
11. FM: How did you spin a film pitch into a novel?
CD: When I enrolled for the creative writing course the idea came back to me and it became something different, it became a fable with Mbeki as the inspiration for the book. The themes remained the same: how people feel close to someone in power who has possibly—or, in the case of the book, definitely—abused their power, and how complicity spreads or doesn’t spread.
12. FM: For a first-time novelist, you’ve gotten lots of kudos from the literary elite. Were you surprised by the response to this book?
CD: You don’t know whether to trust the success and the nice things people say in reviews or not because once the book’s been packaged and the blurbs are on the front, you can’t judge it on your own any more.
13. FM: Have you written anything else since “Blood Kin”?
CD: I finished that book three years ago, so I’ve been done with it. I had a couple of duds afterward. No one’s read them, but I have, and they’re terrible. But the impulse is still there.
14. FM: If not writing, what’s next?
CD: I’m now working on a PhD in anthropology at New York University. My PhD work is in the politics of climate change. I’m going to look at New York and Sydney and how cities are adapting to change, how they justify what they do, and how we witness it.
15. FM: So, are you’re leaving the literary world for academia?
CD: The tricky thing now is I have to decide whether to take myself seriously as a writer or not, and that’s a shift. It sort of happened by mistake. I didn’t take any creative courses at Harvard. I wasn’t part of the Advocate or the Signet. I’m not sure if I would even call myself a writer.