About
Ceridwen was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, in 1980. Her parents are both academics and her mother, Teresa, was one of the first literary critics to write about J.M. Coetzee in the 1980s. Her sister, Lindiwe, is a Lecturer in African Cinema at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and the founder of the Cambridge African Film Festival. Ceridwen's parents now live and teach in Sydney, Australia.
Ceridwen grew up mostly in the small town of East London in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, but she and Lindiwe went to high school in Sydney. After a year in London working and traveling, she did her undergraduate study at Harvard on scholarship, focusing on Social Anthropology and Visual & Environmental Studies (Film). She made a documentary about South African wine farm empowerment projects in the Western Cape wine region, Aftertaste, as part of her Honors thesis, which is distributed by John Marshall's Documentary Educational Resources (www.der.org) and has been screened at ethnographic film festivals around the world. After a year as a research assistant for the current affairs program NOW with Bill Moyers at Channel Thirteen in New York, Ceridwen moved to Cape Town for two years, where she wrote Blood Kin as her thesis for the Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town, with poet Stephen Watson as her supervisor. She now lives in New York City.
Author website