Fuller was in her forties at the time. In articles and interviews, much was made of her age.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that came from publicity, and I was kind of happy to go with it,\u201d she says. \u201cIt is quite a nice story, perhaps not about me being in my forties, but that you can change careers, whether that\u2019s changing to writing or something else. You can make this big shift. If you\u2019re unhappy in what you\u2019re doing, then maybe you should think about doing something else.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now 59, Fuller laughs that \u201cmid-forties feels really young\u201d. She\u2019s long since ditched the marketing role for full-time writing, and is about to release her sixth novel, Hunger and Thirst, loosely a coming-of-age tale about friendship and belonging, but also a haunted house horror that threads true crime and visual art elements. <\/p>\n
Alternating between 1987 and 2023, the book tells of Ursula, a young woman who has spent years in and out of the care system, and later an acclaimed artist, who performs a dark dare that haunts her life thereafter. At its centre is an intense friendship between Ursula and Sue, a young woman she meets working in the post room of a local art school. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always read a lot of spooky stories \u2013 not necessarily horror, but things that are unsettling,\u201d says Fuller when asked about the germ-cell of the book. \u201cI had it in the back of my mind that at some point I might write something that becomes darker than my other books, which all have some kind of dark element, but this one kind of pushes that.\u201d<\/p>\n
She wrote a short story for a competition, in which a group of colleagues are out for a steak dinner in a local inn when one colleague accuses another of having been brought up by animals. The story didn\u2019t place in the competition, but it became an early scene in the book, in which Ursula\u2019s colleague, Vince, speculates that she\u2019s been raised \u201cby monkeys or gorillas\u201d, or perhaps, considering all the rare steak she\u2019s just eaten, \u201cwolves\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always been interested in feral children, or children who supposedly have been brought up by animals,\u201d she says. \u201cI read and reread Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, where the daughter becomes possibly a feral child, possibly brought up by wolves. It\u2019s a book I love and that scene had stuck in my head.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nI write messages to myself in the middle of the text in square brackets that say: this is crap, that\u2019s okay, keep going, close brackets<\/p>\n
\u2014 \u00a0Fuller on her writing process<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Like Johnson, Fuller walks a line between the real and the hyper-real. It is never quite clear if what we are reading is true or a figment of the subconscious, if our narrator is reliable or unreliable.<\/p>\n
Much of the book takes place in a squat Ursula moves into, The Underwood, which has been left empty after its owners met a terrible end. Fuller says she based this on a real-life squat she lived in in the 1980s.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was doing a lot of thinking and remembering about this house. I lived with another girl. The owner had gone off to Australia to visit his family and had just decided never to come back. So, we just stayed in his house with all his stuff, which was really weird. Before I got there, the girls who were living there told me a story about one night where they had all been in bed asleep and someone knocked on the window. Because it was a bungalow, they\u2019d been able to go around the whole house and knock on every window \u2013 just terrifying. But still I moved in because it was free.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her own experience in art school was also fodder for the book. The unnamed art school in Hunger and Thirst is modelled on her alma mater, the Winchester School of Art, while her background in sculpture came in handy when conceiving of the imaginary sculptures Ursula makes (such as the prizewinning Lithopedian, an enormous bear carved from wood, with a human face, and bearing a stone adult foetus within).<\/p>\n
\u201cThe art was such a delight to write,\u201d Fuller says. \u201cTo be able to write a sculpture, rather than have to make it, which is really hard work … You can describe anything. And for Ursula to be a very famous, successful artist was kind of fun, because clearly I am not \u2013 that never worked for me. So, to kind of be it vicariously was fun.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Hunger](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/XQB5I2JNDSAASPXCKDSQLGXVBM.jpg\")
Hunger And Thirst by Claire Fuller <\/p>\n
While prizes in the visual arts may elude her, Fuller is no stranger to literary accolades. She\u2019s twice been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award (Our Endless Numbered Days, 2017, and Bitter Orange, 2020); she\u2019s won the Desmond Elliott Prize (Our Endless Numbered Days, 2015), the Costa Novel Award (Unsettled Ground, 2021), been shortlisted for the Women\u2019s Prize (Unsettled Ground, 2021) and the Encore Award (Swimming Lessons, 2018). Do prizes set a certain expectation or put pressure on the next novel to be good?<\/p>\n
\u201cI really try hard not to think about that,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m just writing a manuscript. I\u2019m not even thinking I\u2019m writing a book that is going to be published, often. I think I find it so hard to write \u2013 although they do come out, these books, they do get written. But I don\u2019t enjoy the processes. So, I tell myself that it\u2019s not a book. I\u2019m just playing around.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, Fuller admits at various junctures that writing is not exactly something she likes to do. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I really like when I\u2019m writing a book is the editing. I don\u2019t really like the writing. I like the polishing, I suppose; the making sure that everything works together, that the right word is in the right place. I think finishing a sculpture can be like that. You\u2019re looking at everything in the round. If you look at it from this angle, does it still work? But the difference is that when you\u2019re sculpting, you are given or find the lump of stone or piece of wood, whereas with writing, you start with nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Something that helps turn the nothing into something is being part of two writers\u2019 groups. Every two weeks, participants share 3,000 words or so of a work-in-progress.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not one of those writers who just wants to keep it all secret and not let anyone see until it\u2019s finished,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s helpful for me [to have] people comment on it as I go along.\u201d<\/p>\n
The deadlines are useful for when she gets stuck, though she also says there is \u201ca bit of me that makes me do it\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tell myself that I\u2019m allowed to write crap. And I write messages to myself in the middle of the text in square brackets that say: this is crap, that\u2019s okay, keep going, close brackets. Somehow it lets out that little voice on my shoulder that\u2019s saying: \u2018This isn\u2019t any good. Why did you do this? No one\u2019s going to read this.\u2019 It lets it out on to, actually, the page, and then I can keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller is published by Fig Tree<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Claire Fuller never thought she would be a writer. Raised in a small Oxfordshire town, the award-winning novelist…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482189,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[18,117,19,17,191706,145103],"class_list":{"0":"post-482188","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-women-s-writing","13":"tag-women-writers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116566096418236185","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482188\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}