Glamour and Grit: Ceridwen Dovey Scoops Award

by Tracey on Apr 20th, 2009

South African women’s magazine Glamour celebrated its fifth birthday this month with the Glamour Women of the Year Awards, which honoured a number of women in different categories – including novelist Ceridwen Dovey, author of Blood Kin (who couldn’t attend the stylish event but surely would have sparkled had she been there!).

Andrea Nagel writes, “Ceridwen Dovey was the winner of “The Next Big Thing” category. Her debut novel, Blood Kin, has already won critical acclaim and has been translated into 12 languages.”

The Harvard Crimson‘s Alexander B. Fabry, meanwhile, describes the author’s remarkable success in more detail:

The book has also scooped three literary awards. It is shortlisted for four more awards, including the Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under 30.

The novel is about power, cruelty and corruption and was inspired by “people who are beneficiaries of a corrupt regime, not the direct perpetrators nor direct victims, but those who are somewhere in between”.

Complete article in The Times

“Always write with a compass but not a map,” says Ceridwen Dovey ’03, quoting the contemporary Spanish author Javier Marias to describe the way she approaches writing. Dovey’s first novel, “Blood Kin,” follows the paths of three members of a presidential staff in a nameless country. “Blood Kin” was published in 2007, and since then, Dovey’s debut novel has accumulated a growing catalog of literary prizes and sparkling reviews. In many ways, the author’s own path has matched her approach to writing.

Though published at first only in South Africa, the novel boasted a blurb by Nobel Prize winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, and quickly began receiving attention. Dovey, whose mother had written one of the first scholarly treatments of Coetzee’s work, called it a “miracle.” Since then, the book has been met with widespread acclaim, and has been published or is awaiting publication in 17 countries.