Dovey was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa and grew up between South Africa and Australia. Her parents derived her unusual name from one of the protagonists in Richard Llewellyn's 1939 Welsh novel, How Green Was My Valley. Dovey attended high school in Australia at North Sydney Girls High School before going to the United States in 1999 to study at Harvard University as an undergraduate where she completed a joint degree in Anthropology and Visual & Environmental Studies in 2003. During her time at Harvard, Dovey made documentaries that highlighted the relationships between farmers and rural laborers in post-apartheid South Africa. She made a documentary about wine farm labor relations in the Western Cape of South Africa, Aftertaste, as part of her Honors thesis, which is distributed by John Marshall's Documentary Educational Resources [1].

In 2004 Dovey worked briefly for the television programme NOW with Bill Moyers at Channel Thirteen in New York before returning to South Africa to study creative writing at the University of Cape Town. She wrote her first novel Blood Kin as her thesis for an MA in creative writing under the supervision of poet Stephen Watson. She now lives in New York City. Her parents live in Sydney and her sister, Lindiwe Dovey, is a lecturer in African Cinema at SOAS in London.

Dovey's first novel, A Novel was published by Atlantic Books (U.K.), Penguin (South Africa) and Penguin (Australia) in July 2007, and by Viking in North America in March 2008. It will be published in a total of fourteen countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Holland, and Sweden. It was shortlisted in 2007 for the U.K.'s John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for British/Commonwealth authors under the age of 35, and was shortlisted in 2008 for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Africa). It tells the story of a fictional military coup from the perspective of the overthrown leader’s portraitist, chef, and barber. The novel is deliberately ambiguous in its setting.