Alexandra Fuller

In 1972 Fuller moved with her family to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She was educated at boarding schools in Umtali and Salisbury (renamed Harare after 1982). 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 had two daughters and one son together.^[2] Their son, Fi, died in his sleep at the age of 21.^[2] She currently spends much of her time in a yurt near Jackson, Wyoming.^[3]

Her first book, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, published in 2001, is a memoir of life with her family living in southern Africa. It won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize in 2002. In the same year it was featured in The New York Times list of "Notable Books" and a finalist for The Guardian's First Book Award.^[4] A sequel, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness about her mother, Nicola Fuller, was published in 2011.^[5]

Her 2004 book Scribbling the Cat, about war's repercussions, received the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage in 2005.^[6]

In her book The Legend of Colton H. Bryant (2008) Fuller 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.^[7]

The autobiographical Leaving Before the Rains Come, published in January 2015, is about the disintegration of Fuller's marriage.

Fuller published her first novel, Quiet Until the Thaw, in 2017.^[8]

In 2019 she published Travel Light, Move Fast about the death of her father and son.

In 2024 she published Fi: A Memoir of My Son, centres on her grief from losing her adult son.^[2]

Fuller received a B.A. from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada.^[9] In 2007 she received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the same institution.^{[citation needed]}

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 (now Zimbabwe), 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 does not hide the effect her mother's alcoholism had on her childhood and is frank about her father's casual racism. 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.

• Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Waterville, Me.: Thorndike 2011. ISBN 9781410439413, OCLC 773423489
• Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier, London: Picador, 2004. ISBN 9781447262534, OCLC 862092268
• Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: an African childhood, London: Picador, 2015. ISBN 9781447275084, OCLC 902723457
• Leaving Before the Rains Come. ULVERSCROFT, 2017. ISBN 9781785413049, OCLC 983282940^[10]
• Fuller, Alexandra (9 April 2024). Fi: A Memoir of My Son. Grove Press. ISBN 978-0-8021-6104-8.^[11][12]

• Whites in Zimbabwe
• British diaspora in Africa

 

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alexandra Fuller.

• Official Website Archived 4 August 2020 at the Wayback Machine
• Powells.com Author interview
• Sketchy biography as winner of the Lettre Ulysses Award
• "Utopia on the Range" – New York Times article on Hell's Backbone Grill by Fuller.
• Appearances on C-SPAN