J.M. Coetzee is the gold standard, Dovey says.

Question: Which writers have influenced your writing?

Dovey: Well Coetzee, the South African writer has been a kind of gold standard of writing always for my family. My mom was a literary critic, and she sort of wrote about him in the ‘80s when he was only well known in South Africa. So he’s always had this kind of mythic status for me as a writer. And the ways that he has steered quite, you know . . . quite purposefully away from autobiography. I mean obviously there’s elements of that; but that he’s working always at a theoretical level and really unpacking or deconstructing different discourses from within. And so I . . . That kind of writing that’s working on all these different levels, I think, is just amazing. And I don’t know how you do it but . . . (chuckles) you know. Recorded on: 12/6/07