Ceridwen Dovey: The darkness of my golden years

South African-born novelist Ceridwen Dovey explains how benefiting from apartheid, however indirectly, fuelled her passionate desire to write about injustice

A powerful fable about revolution, resistance and a society in turmoil is the only debut on the shortlist of this year's John Llewellyn Rhys prize. Blood Kin, by Ceridwen Dovey, like the other three novels on the shortlist, was entirely overlooked by the Man Booker, but has been rightly singled out for recognition by the judges of one of the UK's oldest literary awards, founded 65 years ago in memory of John Llewellyn Rhys, an author who died in the Second World War.

On 29 November, the winner will be handed a cheque for £5,000, with the five other shortlisted candidates taking a £500 purse for their labours. Compared to the five- and six-figure hauls of the Man Booker or the Impac literary prizes, these relatively modest sums belie the prestige of this award, given for the best work of literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry or drama) by a Commonwealth writer under the age of 35. Past winners include William Boyd, Jeanette Winterson, David Mitchell, and Dovey's fellow nominees are well-established names: the novelist Sarah Hall (The Carhullan Army), the nature-writer Robert Macfarlane (The Wild Places), Joanna Kavenna, with Inglorious, her harrowing novel about a breakdown, Gwendoline Riley's third novel Joshua Spassky and Rory Stewart's account of governing a province in Iraq, Occupational Hazards. Dovey has stiff competition, in other words, although it's worth pointing out that last year another debut novel won the prize: Washington-born, Harvard-educated Uzodinma Iweala's account of child soldiering in Africa, Beasts of No Nation.

South African-born Dovey, who now lives in New York, is understandably delighted to be in the running. "This was completely out of the blue," she exclaims. "I didn't even know my publishers were entering my book." For someone with so disarming a laugh, the novel is a remarkably pitiless, pared down examination of how power corrupts relationships. "We all know power and desire couple effortlessly," reflects one of the novel's wily, self-serving characters, which is an aphoristic manifesto for his personality and one of the underlying emphases of Dovey's sharp, intense work.

Blood Kin, like Iweala's Beasts, quickly demonstrates the depth and confidence of an accomplished writer. It's no apprentice work. Yet Dovey drifted into writing after she ended up in Cape Town in 2004 with no capital to pursue her trade as a freelance film-maker. The novel was written as her thesis for an MA in creative writing. "Making documentaries was really harder than I expected," Dovey confesses, "especially since I couldn't even afford a camera! I began tutoring high school kids just to pay the rent, which worked well with the very laid-back MA. There was only one class per week but, with South African writers coming in to teach in a very unstructured way, it did provide a community of people for me when I didn't know anyone."

Bailing out of film-making denied Dovey a creative outlet, which she began to resolve by reawakening a deep-seated interest in literature. "Part of the problem was this feeling that to tell important stories in South Africa, you have to put yourself on the line, and put your body on the line – which made the more private form of writing fiction very appealing. And there was no need for expensive equipment," she adds judiciously. The book was typed on a borrowed computer that she never moved from the shared flat's living-room table, for fear it would be stolen.

Blood Kin is not, however, set in South Africa, but in an unnamed country where a man known only as the Commander has just led a successful coup d'état in the coastal capital, and has sequestered the deposed president up in the mountains in his summer residence. The impressionistic narrative builds up from the reflections of three men attending the president in his (and so also their) captivity: his craven portraitist, his Machiavellian cook and his barber, who only took the job to get physical access to the despot in order to kill him, but who quailed at the task. The location is deliberately unspecific, though Dovey concedes that topographically it was modelled more on Beirut than any other city.

Vargas Llosa, Marquez and Ngugi wa Thiong'o gave Dovey ample source material for tyranny, but it was The Emperor, Ryszard Kapuscinski's anatomy of Haile Selassie's court, which gave Dovey the idea for her unusual structure. "I found his focus on the ordinary men who propped up Selassie's regime – in particular, his servants – fascinating," she says. "His description of 'superfluous people in the service of brute power' proved a fertile place to look for something interesting about those bigger themes."

The major theme is that of the bystanders' shrugging of responsibility. Growing up in South Africa during the apartheid years versed Dovey, with some hindsight, in the varying degrees of complicity that conflict with conscience and integrity. Her father, who taught in a university education department riddled with spies, began receiving threatening night-time phone calls for his vocal criticism of apartheid, which precipitated the family's many moves around South Africa and several sojourns in Australia.

"Mahmoud Mamdani cleared a space for the kind of ambiguities about wrongdoing that I've been aware of from a young age," Dovey explains, drawing on her anthropological studies at Harvard to bring together the moral clinches that affected her own upbringing and the skewered characters in Blood Kin. "He distinguishes perpetrators, victims and beneficiaries, which I find very useful categories. Thinking about being a beneficiary is another way of asking yourself: which are worse – the sins of omission or commission? How do we draw the line between things for which we are directly and indirectly responsible?"

In the book there's certainly a kind of moral and psychological fallout from the hiding and eavesdropping, lying and chicanery of characters striving to stay afloat in a despotic regime. Dovey's male voices are admirable achievements but she took greater pleasure in writing the voices of their wives, daughters and lovers which emerge in the mid-section of the novel. "I didn't want the female characters to seem like helpless victims. They are just as implicated as their men in the sorts of power struggles going on, and they also bring home the disintegration of values that is the fallout from that kind of brutal regime. They weren't perpetrators or victims, but were certainly beneficiaries.

"To me that's a very personal link," Dovey confides. "We as a family certainly benefited in some ways under apartheid, even though we were staunchly opposed to it. Family relationships were often very complicated. I remember having to cope with grandparents whom I loved but whose very different political beliefs I couldn't understand."

Trying to make sense of this "dissonance of lived realities" was one of Dovey's impetuses to write Blood Kin. "I wanted to re-engage with the South Africa that I left when I was 14," she reveals, "but post-apartheid, there was a kind of cultural turning inwards which meant that, as a white South African returning after 10 years, I didn't feel that I had much access – and I really wanted to avoid writing autobiographically. The politics of writing there are so fraught with issues of identity that I was quite paralysed by self-consciousness." Although she denies that he is in any way a model for the regimes in Blood Kin, the "enigmatic figure" of Thabo Mbeki, who took over from Nelson Mandela as South Africa's president in 1999, interested her greatly as a more opaque approach to thinking about her country – but then, she adds ominously, "the idea got a lot darker". Whenever she looks back on growing up in South Africa in the 1980s, she confesses, it's with a deep ambivalence. "That was a golden decade for me, my childhood – but then you get a bit older and you realise what was going on during those years. My generation came of age in a South Africa we could feel proud of, whilst still being beneficiaries of that system of apartheid in the Eighties."

Despite this resurgent homeland pride, the dénouement of Blood Kin is very grim. How did that happen?

"I was surprised too, at how bleak it ended up!" she laughs. "My parents were horrified! I don't know. I'm a perfectly happy person," she claims, with enthusiasm. "I did cut out the book's original epigraph – Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil – because it was just too bleak." She hints that her next novel might be a little more light-hearted. "Ian McEwan has it that nihilism is the privilege of youth, and I think he's right," she quips. "I do hope I grow out of that." *

The Extract
Blood Kin By Ceridwen Dovey (Atlantic £10.99)

'...My husband has proven fickle when it comes to the prisoners: the ones he feels have in some way proved their usefulness he has released, while others who are more closely implicated have remained in the Summer Residence. He likes having them there, the way a cat likes having a lizard to play with, with no intention of killing it, but perhaps severing its tail... it can grow another'