Alexandra Fuller


Alexandra Fuller is a British-Rhodesian author who lives in the U.S. state of Wyoming.

Biography

Fuller was born in the town of Glossop, England, but moved with her family to Rhodesia in 1972 and was educated at boarding schools in Umtali and Salisbury. Her first book was 2001's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, a memoir of life with her family living in southern Africa. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize in 2002, was a 2002 "Notable Book" of The New York Times and a finalist for The Guardian First Book Award. Scribbling the Cat, her second book, was released in 2004. It is about war's repercussions. It won the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage in 2005.
In Fuller's third book, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, she narrates the short life of a Wyoming roughneck who fell to his death at age 25 in February 2006 on an oil rig owned by Patterson–UTI Energy. A second memoir, Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness, is about her mother, Nicola Fuller.
Leaving Before the Rains Come, published in January 2015, is about the disintegration of Fuller's marriage.
Her first novel, Quiet Until the Thaw, was published on 27 June 2017.
Fuller's articles and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Granta, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times.

Fuller received a B.A. from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. In 2007 she received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the same institution. She met her American husband, Charlie Ross, in Zambia, where he was running a rafting business for tourists. In 1994, they moved to his home state of Wyoming. Fuller and Ross divorced in 2012. They have three children. She currently spends much of her time in a yurt near Jackson, Wyoming.

''Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight''

The memoir follows Fuller, called Bobo by her family, and her sister and parents as they move from England to Rhodesia and other points in Central Africa. The book mainly focuses on stories of family life while moving around Rhodesia, Malawi and Zambia. The Rhodesian Bush War, or Second Chimurenga, serves as a backdrop to the family's time in Rhodesia. After the Rhodesian Bush War, the Fullers move to Malawi and then Zambia.
Fuller recalls comic stories about her mother getting drunk at dinner and staying up all night, but does not hide the effect her mother's alcoholism had on her childhood. Fuller writes about living through a war, being white while growing up in an almost all-black country, and the death of siblings and beloved animals.

Works