Anna Funder (born 1966) is an Australian author. She is the author of Stasiland, All That I Am, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life and the novella The Girl With the Dogs. Anna’s novel Wifedom was a Sunday Times Bestseller and New York Times Notable Book of 2023.

Life

Education

Funder attended primary school in Melbourne and Paris; and later Star of the Sea College, Melbourne, graduating as Dux in 1983. She studied at the University of Melbourne and the Freie Universität of Berlin, and holds a BA (Hons) and an LLB (Hons). She also holds an MA from the University of Melbourne and a Doctor of Creative Arts degree from the University of Technology Sydney. Funder speaks French and German fluently.

Legal career

Funder worked for the Australian Government as an international lawyer in human rights, constitutional law and treaty negotiation, before turning to writing full-time in the late 1990s.

Family

She lived with her husband and three children in Brooklyn, New York, returning to Australia in 2015 after three and a half years.

Stasiland

Funder's first book Stasiland published in 2003 tells the stories of people who resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi. Stasiland has been translated into 16 languages. Stasiland won the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize and was also the finalist for the Age Book of the Year Awards, Guardian First Book Award, Queensland Premier's Literary Award, Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature (Innovation in Writing), Index Freedom of Expression Awards and the W.H. Heinemann Award.

All That I Am

Funder's 2012 novel All That I Am tells the previously untold story of four German-Jewish anti-Hitler activists forced to flee to London. There, they continued the dangerous and illegal work of smuggling documents out of Goering's office, and giving them to Winston Churchill (a backbencher at the time) to try to alert the world to Hitler's plans for war. In 1935 two of them were found dead from poison in mysterious circumstances in a locked room in Bloomsbury. The book was called "superb" by The Spectator, "strong and impressively humane" by the Times Literary Supplement), "a beautiful ensemble novel of Graham Green’esque proportions" by Weekendavisen and "an essential novel" by Colum McCann. The novel was BBC Book of the Week and Book at Bedtime in the UK, and The Times (London) Book of the Month for May 2012.

Awards received

Awards nominated

Writing

Anna Funder's essays, feature articles and columns have appeared in numerous publications, such as The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, Best Australian Essays, The Monthly Ny Tid, and have been selected for Best Australian Essays. Her feature Secret History which appeared in The Guardian and in Good Weekend about the files from the Nazi death camps held in obscurity by German authorities won the 2007 ASA Maunder Award for Journalism.

Human rights activities

Funder is an ambassador for the Norwegian-based International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN). ICORN is a global network of cities offering safe havens for persecuted writers. She is a member of the Advisory Panel of the Australian Privacy Foundation. Funder is a member of the Folio Prize Academy and PEN International, in both the Australian and US chapters. In 2007 she was selected to deliver a PEN 3 Writers Lecture.

Public appearances and named lectures

She has toured as a public speaker, and is a former German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Australia Council for the Arts, NSW Writing and Rockefeller Foundation fellow. Funder has delivered numerous named lectures, including:

Awards and recognition

List of literary awards: List of literary award nominations: Fellowships: Other recognition: