Alexandra Fuller
Alexandra Fuller was raised and educated in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, during and after that country’s war for liberation from white minority rule. That upbringing forever impressed upon her the doublespeak of war, the settler culture of dissimulating racism, and also the beauty and courage of the artists who created works of resistance – art, poetry, novels – under conditions of shape-shifting political oppression.
Fuller’s career as a writer has spanned a quarter of a century. She is the prizewinning, bestselling author of one novel and seven works of non-fiction, most notably the 2001 memoir,
Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight. She is also the co-producer of the 2025 movie of the same name.
Her latest memoir, Fi: A Memoir of My Son, a career-defining work about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child, was a 2025 Pulitzer Finalist in Memoir. Fi was named Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and The Washington Post, an Editors' Choice by The New York Times, and a Top 10 Nonfiction Book (#2) and Must-Read Book of the Year by TIME.
It’s midsummer in Wyoming, and Alexandra is barely hanging on. Grieving her father, pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, and reeling from a midlife breakup.
And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly - her son Fi, at 21 years old, dies in his sleep.
No stranger to loss - young siblings, a parent, a home country - Alexandra is nonetheless leveled. From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole – finding no answer and yet countless answers. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.
Alexandra was a longtime contributor to National Geographic Magazine; her articles, opinions, and reviews have also appeared in many other publications, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Financial Times, the Economist, the Guardian, the LA Times, Vogue, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, and the New York Times Book Review.
She lives and writes in Idaho and New Mexico.