Meet the shortlist: Ceridwen Dovey
Only the Animals is one of the six books included on our inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award shortlist. Here we ask Ceridwen Dovey five quick questions.
If you were opening your own bookshop, what are three titles that would always be kept on your shelves?
The three titles permanently stocked in my own bookshop would be Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee, The Tree of Man by Patrick White and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood.
What’s the strangest piece of advice you’ve ever been given as a writer? (And did it work?)
Somebody said to me years ago that writing is not about waiting for inspiration, it’s just about ‘bum on chair’. It’s great advice – to be a writer you have to be writing, not thinking about writing, or planning to write – and that means sitting down whenever you can and putting words on the page even when it’s the last thing you feel like doing.
And yes, it has worked!
Do you remember the first book that made you want to be a writer?
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.
I wrote one of my first poems as a teenager in response to Wuthering Heights, a slightly misguided attempt at an updated Gothic Australian version of the story, with a boy stolen from his original family who runs away into the bush and is haunted by ghosts. And A Wizard of Earthsea made me appreciate Le Guin’s enormous powers of invention, and inspired me to want to see if I could push my own imagination to its limits, and not feel obliged to draw only on my own life experience in my writing.
Do you listen to music while you write? Why or why not?
No, never, it’s too distracting. Though I do sometimes listen to white noise (the ‘gentle rain’ track) when I’m writing at my local library and there’s a talk or event on and I’m trying to keep working!
If Only the Animals were made into a film, who would you like to see in the starring role?
I’m not sure many actors would be very keen to act as any of the ten animal souls narrating Only the Animals in the movie version. Perhaps there would be more takers if it were an animated film … and I can’t help but think that Seth Rogen would be perfect for the voice of the freewheeling mussel that dies in Pearl Harbor.
