Writers in Conversation: Claire Fuller
A special Writers in Conversation event that explores the connections between the art of writing and the art of music.
Costa Prize-winning novelist Claire Fuller (‘Unsettled Ground’) is joined by her son, the musician Henry Ayling. The evening features music that Ayling wrote in response to Fuller’s latest novel, ‘Hunger and Thirst’. Fuller will read from the novel and discuss its origins and relationship to music in a conversation with author Carole Burns, host of Writers in Conversation and an associate professor teaching Creative Writing at the University of Southampton.
‘Hunger and Thirst’ is set in the ‘80s at the Winchester School of Art, where Fuller earned a BFA (check) in Sculpture at WSA. It tells the story of Ursula, a girl in care who carries out a dare that continues to haunt her decades later when she is an acclaimed artist.
Fuller often has a playlist while writing her prize-winning novels. For ‘Hunger and Thirst’, she instead asked her son to write music after she was finished writing. The novel explores themes of loneliness, female friendship, and the longing to belong.
Writers in Conversation is a reading series sponsored by the University’s English department in association with Turner Sims. It features some of today’s best fiction writers, poets, non-fiction writers and playwrights reading from their work and talking about their writing – how characters take shape and where ideas come from. Led by Carole Burns, author and associate professor, the evenings aim for an atmosphere that is relaxed and engaging, intelligent yet informal.
With book sales from October Books.
Atmospheric, pyschologically thrilling and unputdownable..it frightened and enthralled me.
Claire Fuller was born in Oxfordshire, in 1967. She gained a degree in sculpture from Winchester School of Art, but went on to have a long career in marketing and didn’t start writing until she was forty. She has written five previous novels including: Unsettled Ground, which in 2021 won the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize, Swimming Lessons, which was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester and lives in Hampshire with her husband.
Henry Ayling is a Bristol-based singer-songwriter, who plays fingerstyle acoustic guitar. Playing and singing his own songs as well as including the occasional cover and traditional ballad, Henry is known for his masterful fingerpicking, his soulful voice, and his original folky style.
Claire Fuller © Adrian Harvey
Carole Burns is an award-winning writer and associate professor of English at the University of Southampton, where she directs the Writers in Conversation reading series featuring guests such as Helen Macdonald, Xiaolu Guo, Jennifer Egan and Patrice Lawrence.
A journalist for publications such as the Washington Post and LitHub, Burns’s novel, The Same Country, explores race, class and complicity in contemporary America. It was described by the writer Gish Jen as a novel that “unearths long-buried truths that remain the truths of America,” and named a best Welsh fiction book of 2023 by Wales Arts Review.
Burns’s collection, The Missing Woman and Other Stories, published by Parthian Books, won the 2015 John C. Zacharis First Book Award by the prestigious U.S. literary journal Ploughshares. Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between, published by W.W. Norton, was based on interviews with 43 authors including Jhumpa Lahiri, Anthony Doerr and the late A.S. Byatt.
She recently served as the 2025 ficiton judge for the Wales Book of the Year Award, and lives in Cardiff.
Tickets £8 (£7.20 Friends)
Students and Under 18s: £5
Schools £5
For full offer details see Booking tickets >
