Finuala Dowling
Biographical info
Finuala Dowling was born in Cape Town in 1962. She completed her MA Degree at the University of Cape Town and proceeded to lecture English from 1989 to 1995 at Unisa in Pretoria. She completed her Doctorate at the same university.
Finuala is now a freelance writer, lecturer and editor. She writes school books and lives in Kalk Bay.
Her first volume of poetry, I Flying, was published in 2002 and was awarded the Ingrid Jonker Prize in 2004. In 2003 she was the co-winner of the Sanlam Poetry Prize for her manuscript Doo-wop Girls of the Universe.
Her first novel, entitled What Poets Need, was published in 2005. She also writes stage plays and cabarets, and has won the Spier/PANSA Audience Award for Bungee Writing Finals (2002).
Did you know?
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Finuala is an Irish name which means “white shoulder” and relates to a myth about a swan. |
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She has given readings of her work at the Aldeburgh Festival in the United Kingdom, as well as at various literary festivals in South Africa. |
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Along with her sisters, Cara and Tessa Dowling, she has formed a theatre company called Dowling Sister Productions. They have regular music and reading events, as well as cabaret performances. |
Books still in print
Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart, Kwela Books (2011)
Notes from the Dementia Ward, Kwela Boeke/Snailpress (2008)
Awards
Olive Schreiner Prize (2010) – Notes from the Dementia Ward
Sanlam Poetry Prize (2003) – Doo-wop Girls of the Universe
Ingrid Jonker Prize (2004) – I Flying
List of published works
Poetry
2002 I Flying, Carapace
2006 Doo-wop Girls of the Universe, Penguin
2008 Notes from the Dementia Ward, Kwela Books/Snailpress
Prose
2005 What Poets Need, Penguin
2007 Flyleaf, Penguin
2011 Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart, Kwela Books
Anthologies
2006 Portraits of African Writers (by George Hallett), Wits University Press
2006 Lovely Beyond Any Singing: Landscape in South African Literature, Double Storey
Excerpts from reviews
“Notes is a volume which delivers a huge lump in your throat and a wide smile on your face, because Dowling is the local master of tragicomedy.” – Danie Marais (Boeke-Insig, 2009)
“This volume is heart wrenching, comical, humoristic, ironical, surrealistic. With subtle metaphor. A unique volume, with a variety of tools and themes and a strangeness (newness) which sometimes also exposes the dementia of the poet. I enjoyed it and agree with the old lady in the institution which the author presents as follows: ‘I was going to say / This is my daughter Nuala / - she’s just a little bit odd.’” – Ampie Coetzee (Die Burger, 2009)
(Photo: Simone Scholtz)
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