Ceridwen Dovey
Teoksen Blood Kin tekijä
Tietoja tekijästä
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 näytä lisää 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. (Bowker Author Biography) näytä vähemmän
Tekijän teokset
Associated Works
Merkitty avainsanalla
Yleistieto
- Syntymäaika
- 1980
- Sukupuoli
- female
- Kansalaisuus
- South Africa (birth)
Australia - Syntymäpaikka
- Pietermaritzburg, Natal, South Africa
- Asuinpaikat
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
New York, New York, USA - Koulutus
- North Sydney Girls' High School
Harvard University
University of Cape Town
New York University - Ammatit
- novelist
short-story writer
essayist
anthropologist - Palkinnot ja kunnianosoitukset
- National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" (2009)
- Agentti
- Sarah Chalfant or Charles Buchan (The Wylie Agency)
Jäseniä
Kirja-arvosteluja
Only the Animals Tekijä: Ceridwen Dovey
Dovey manages to intertwine questions of humanity with animals and conflict in a way that has you empathising with both humans and animals experiencing tragedy. Each short story gives insight into elements of hypocrisy and devastation in the historical events that rocked the world. A different take on conflict than other short stories, and one that is certainly worth the read.
"Telling fairy tales: two bears are the only ones left in 1992 in the Sarajevo zoo after all the other animals have starved to death. The black bear is waiting for the blind, female brown bear to die so he can eat her. A witch who risks getting shot sneaking bread in for him and his companion gives him some horrifying news as he is sucking on her thigh bone."
"I, the elephant, wrote this: I loved this story of a tribe of female elephants. The elders tell the young ones stories of their ancestors, whose souls are in the stars. Twin sisters dream of dying a heroic death so their souls will be in the stars, just as Castor and Pollux, twin brother elephants in the Paris zoo during the Paris Commune, when all the animals in the zoo were eaten by the rich."
"More: a mussel who travels from the Hudson River to Oregon and on to Hawaii, and then dies in the attack of Pearl Harbor; a tortoise who travels to space in the great space race;"
"Trippy book about different Animals that died: a camel that had to carry an upright piano roped to its back in Australia; Colette's cat who died in the trenches of WWI; a chimpanzee trained to speak, dress, act and talk like an Englishman is having a female chimpanzee groomed to be his wife, but he's in love with an englishwoman; a dog, betrayed by his jealous master, is starved and has a bomb put on his back, and, when food is put under a tank, goes to its"reward."
A letter to Sylvia PLath: a dolphin belonging to the U.S. Navy is deployed in 2003 to Iraq. Her job is to attach a golf-ball-sized tag on the breathing tubes of any divers caught near a military vessel. (paraphrased)"why do you think humans feel a strange tingling when they (cruelly participate in) swim with dolphins? It's because we dolphins scan you."
Psittacophile: this is the last story: Grrr; another story about a human who makes a commitment to take care of an animal and then dumps it. Just because Israelis started bombing Beirut is no reason to leave a parrot locked in its cage hanging from the awning of the now-deserted pet store where the human bought"Barnes."… (lisätietoja)
"I, the elephant, wrote this: I loved this story of a tribe of female elephants. The elders tell the young ones stories of their ancestors, whose souls are in the stars. Twin sisters dream of dying a heroic death so their souls will be in the stars, just as Castor and Pollux, twin brother elephants in the Paris zoo during the Paris Commune, when all the animals in the zoo were eaten by the rich."
"More: a mussel who travels from the Hudson River to Oregon and on to Hawaii, and then dies in the attack of Pearl Harbor; a tortoise who travels to space in the great space race;"
"Trippy book about different Animals that died: a camel that had to carry an upright piano roped to its back in Australia; Colette's cat who died in the trenches of WWI; a chimpanzee trained to speak, dress, act and talk like an Englishman is having a female chimpanzee groomed to be his wife, but he's in love with an englishwoman; a dog, betrayed by his jealous master, is starved and has a bomb put on his back, and, when food is put under a tank, goes to its"reward."
A letter to Sylvia PLath: a dolphin belonging to the U.S. Navy is deployed in 2003 to Iraq. Her job is to attach a golf-ball-sized tag on the breathing tubes of any divers caught near a military vessel. (paraphrased)"why do you think humans feel a strange tingling when they (cruelly participate in) swim with dolphins? It's because we dolphins scan you."
Psittacophile: this is the last story: Grrr; another story about a human who makes a commitment to take care of an animal and then dumps it. Just because Israelis started bombing Beirut is no reason to leave a parrot locked in its cage hanging from the awning of the now-deserted pet store where the human bought"Barnes."… (lisätietoja)
I rarely have low-rated books because I typically DNF books that I’m not enjoying – and, out of principle, I don’t rate book I don’t finish. “In the Garden of the Fugitives” is told in a series of email exchanges between two people with a lot of ugly history. Vita has forbidden Royce, her one-time mentor, from contacting her. After he initates contact anyway, they both embark on a bizarre trip down memory lane, exchanging history and throwing shady accusations at each other.
The plot was psychologically engrossing and key details about their relationship were slowly revealed throughout the book. It’s a slow burn that ended up burning out with an all-too obvious ending and no clear takeaway or outcome. It left me feeling deeply unsatisfied.… (lisätietoja)
The plot was psychologically engrossing and key details about their relationship were slowly revealed throughout the book. It’s a slow burn that ended up burning out with an all-too obvious ending and no clear takeaway or outcome. It left me feeling deeply unsatisfied.… (lisätietoja)
Reading Mothertongues is so much fun, it takes a while to realise how political it is.
In a meditation that riffs on the kind of writing that women might do, the authors cite Rachel Cusk (paraphrasing Virgina Woolf): 'the woman writer might have to break everything'.
Well, it's true that there's not much collaborative writing about, but I've reviewed books written collaboratively, and Sue at Whispering Gums has more. And since the rise of 'creative non-fiction' the boundaries both between fiction and memoir but also hybrid texts of prose and poetry have blurred. But let's not argue: Mothertongues goes on to refer to Maria Tumarkin, who suggests that...
Well, dear readers, I can assure you that Mothertongues is not a Motherhood Memoir, because I wouldn't have read it if it were, see my review policy. (The ones I've come across haven't been smug or astonished, they've been whingy, mundane, boring and probably hurtful to the children if they read it.) Mothertongues is as much about the madness of modern life and it's often very funny.
TO read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/04/05/mothertongues-by-ceridwen-dovey-eliza-bell/… (lisätietoja)
In a meditation that riffs on the kind of writing that women might do, the authors cite Rachel Cusk (paraphrasing Virgina Woolf): 'the woman writer might have to break everything'.
Woolf's call to action means rejecting the old art forms that we have inherited as women, the ones we still try to fold ourselves into, at great cost. Rejecting the old idea that holds such sway over us: that only one name must be on a book of literary fiction or it is not worthy. That a book must clearly delineate whether it is fiction or memoir, novel or stories, poetry or criticism. That a single, coherent voice is what is most valued when it comes to literary merit. (p.241)
Well, it's true that there's not much collaborative writing about, but I've reviewed books written collaboratively, and Sue at Whispering Gums has more. And since the rise of 'creative non-fiction' the boundaries both between fiction and memoir but also hybrid texts of prose and poetry have blurred. But let's not argue: Mothertongues goes on to refer to Maria Tumarkin, who suggests that...
...embracing innovation and experimentation, 'hybridity of form' and the unexpected, could save the Motherhood Memoir genre from collapsing under the excessive use of an irritating tone she describes as 'smug-yet-astonished' (she is, here, agreeing with Anne Enright). Tumarkin still believes in the Motherhood Memoir. She wants it to exist and persists. She just wants it to be a whole lot weirder and more difficult to categorise. So do we. We also want to be able to write an experimental book of bio-autofiction about motherhood and not have it immediately tagged as memoir. Who knows which shelf it will end up on in bookstores... but the not-knowing is part of the point. (p.241-2)
Well, dear readers, I can assure you that Mothertongues is not a Motherhood Memoir, because I wouldn't have read it if it were, see my review policy. (The ones I've come across haven't been smug or astonished, they've been whingy, mundane, boring and probably hurtful to the children if they read it.) Mothertongues is as much about the madness of modern life and it's often very funny.
At Bunnings, looking for a metal connector thingy for the washing machine tube to attach to the pipe, I notice they are described as 'male' or 'female', and named after specific body parts.
Brass compression female lugged
Brass compression elbow female
Brass compression elbow male
Brass compression union female
Brass threaded black nut
Mini cistern cock white
Hex nipple reducing galvanised
There's a whole erotic subculture thriving at the back of the musty laundry cupboard. My washing machine has a more active sex life than I do. (pp.149-150)
TO read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/04/05/mothertongues-by-ceridwen-dovey-eliza-bell/… (lisätietoja)
Listat
Palkinnot
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Tilastot
- Teokset
- 11
- Also by
- 2
- Jäseniä
- 413
- Suosituimmuussija
- #58,991
- Arvio (tähdet)
- 3.6
- Kirja-arvosteluja
- 23
- ISBN:t
- 65
- Kielet
- 5