Alexandra Fuller

Alexandra Fuller
Alexandra Fuller
Born	1969 England
Occupation	Author
Nationality	United Kingdom Zimbabwe United States
Notable award(s)	2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize 2002 Booksense best non-fiction book 2004 Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage

Alexandra Fuller on Bookbits radio.

Alexandra Fuller (born 1969 in the United Kingdom) is an Anglo-African author, who currently lives in the U.S. state of Wyoming.

Biography

Her first book was Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, a memoir of life with her family living all around Africa. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize in 2002, was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002 and a finalist for The Guardian's First Book Award. Scribbling the Cat, her second book, was released in 2004. It is an unflinching tale of war’s repercussions. It won the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage in 2005.

In her third book, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, she narrates the tragically 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.

Her most recent book is Cocktail Hour Under The Tree Of Forgetfulness about her mother, Nicola Fuller.

Fuller’s articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including 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 where they currently live in the town of Wilson. They have three children.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

The memoir follows Fuller, called Bobo by her family in the book, and her sister and parents as they move from England to Rhodesia and then to other points in Central Africa. The book mainly focus on stories of family life while moving around Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Malawi and Zambia. The Rhodesian Bush War, or Second Chimurenga, in 1981 serves as a backdrop to the family's time in Rhodesia. Fuller shares her experiences of having her dad off in the countryside for weeks on end, helping a local militia group. She tells stories of her dad teaching her and her sister how to shoot his FN rifle, and she shares funny stories about what a bad shot her mother is. After the Rhodesian Bush War, the Fullers moved first to Malawi, then to Zambia.

Fuller shows her reader the true sides of her sister and her parents. She recalls hilarious stories about her mother getting drunk at dinner and staying up all night, but also does not hide the effect her mother's alcoholism had on her childhood. Fuller writes about living through a war, being white growing up in an almost all-black country, and the death of siblings and beloved animals.

See also

• Whites in Zimbabwe
• Anglo-African

External links

• Official Website
• Powells.com Author interview
• Sketchy biography as winner of the Lettre Ulysses Award
• [1] - New York Times article on Hell's Backbone Grill, Boulder, Utah.