| Alexandra
Fuller has written three books of non-fiction. Her debut book,
Don’t
Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
(Random House, 2001), was a New York Times Notable Book
for 2002, the 2002 Booksense Best Non-fiction book, a finalist
for the Guardian’s First Book Award and the winner of
the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Her 2004 Scribbling
the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (Penguin Press)
won the Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage. Her latest book
is The
Legend of Colton H Bryant (May, 2008 by Penguin Press).
Fuller has also written extensively for magazines and newspapers
including The New Yorker magazine and National Geographic
magazine.
Alexandra Fuller
was born the third of five children to Tim and Nicola Fuller
in Glossop, England in 1969, during a brief attempt by her parents
to live off the continent of Africa. “A bloody awful dreary
place,” her mother called England afterwards. So it was
back to Africa for the Fullers in 1972, to Rhodesia, where the
Fullers became absorbed, more and more, by that country’s
intensifying bloody struggle for independence, “War was
like an episode of awful, non-stop weather to us,” Fuller
has said. “There were all the signs of build up, but we
thought it might blow over. And then, once you’re in the
middle of something that intense and all your resources and
energy are going into fighting it, there’s no thought
of anything except survival. You can’t even think about
winning.”
Fuller’s experience
of that war (the Fullers farmed close enough to the Mozambique
border that they could hear the landmines that separated the
two countries going off when people or animals stood on them,
and both her parents joined up to fight against the liberation
army – her father as a soldier and her mother as a Police
Reservist) has informed all three of her books which are, at
heart, anti-war stories. But they are also love stories, “People
think the book is a love letter to Africa,”
Fuller has said of her debut memoir, “....but
really it is a love letter to my mother--a fiercely glamorous,
hard-drinking woman capable of terrifying and sometimes racist
madness and equally terrifying compassion, and a woman whose
madness was fueled by the death of three of her children.”
Fuller was educated in
Zimbabwe until she was eighteen, first at a small government
boarding school near the family’s farm in the country’s
eastern mountains and then at a private girls-only boarding
school in Harare. Watching the celebratory atmosphere in the
aftermath of independence gradually – and then precipitously
– turn into the horror of Mugabe’s one-man attempt
to take a country to the grave with him has also informed Fuller’s
work. While she has not written anything overtly political,
she says that everything we do is political from the decision
we make to wake up in the morning to the clothes we put on our
bodies, to the words we have the courage to speak. “Africa
is a great teacher,” she has explained. “We’re
not a good example of much, but we’re a terrible warning
of power run amok and of the long, high price of oppression.”
The early experience of being always close to death and to the
reality of death has made Fuller’s work ring with a kind
of urgent honesty, “I never felt immortal,” she
explained in a 2002 interview, “ – always a breath
away from dying, and that gives [a person] supernatural clarity.”
But that realization of life’s swiftness has also given
Fuller’s words a startling, sometimes mordant, humor that
is the key behind the success of her work.
Since 1994, she has lived
in Wyoming with her husband. They have three children, several
horses, three dogs, three cats and a satisfactory amount of
chaos.
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