Anna Funder

Life

Funder went to primary school in Melbourne and Paris; she attended Star of the Sea College and graduated as Dux in 1983. She studied at the University of Melbourne and the Freie Universität of Berlin, and holds a BA (Hons) and LLB (Hons). She also has an MA from the University of Melbourne and a Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Technology Sydney. 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.

Anna Funder’s writing has received numerous accolades and awards. Her essays, feature articles and columns have appeared in numerous publications, such as the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, Best Australian Essays and The Monthly. She has toured as a public speaker, and is a former DAAD (Berlin), Australia Council, NSW Writing and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow.

In 2011 she was appointed to the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.

Funder speaks French and German fluently. She lived with her husband and three children in Brooklyn, New York, returning to Australia after three and a half years.

Stasiland

Funder’s Stasiland tells stories of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi. Stasiland has been published in twenty countries and translated into a seventeen languages; it is on school and university reading lists around the world.

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. But the Gestapo was – even this early – active in London. In 1935 two of them, both women, were found dead from poison in mysterious circumstances in a locked room in Bloomsbury. The coroner's inquest into the deaths was a whitewash. Funder’s novel reimagines courage, desire and resistance, and what happened in that room. The book has been hailed as ‘Superb’ (The Spectator), ‘strong and impressively humane' (The Times Literary Supplement), ‘a beautiful ensemble novel of Graham Green’esque proportions’ (Weekendavisen (Denmark)) and ‘an essential novel’ by Column McCann.

All That I Am has been published in twenty countries and spent over one and a half years on the bestseller list, appearing several times at number one. 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.

All That I Am won Australia’s most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin Prize, 2012 as well as:

All That I Am was also a finalist for the:

Human rights activities

Anna Funder trained as an international and human rights lawyer, interests which she continues to pursue in her professional and public life as a writer. She frequently speaks in public on issues ranging from free speech and privacy to the rights of both citizens and non-citizens (refugees). Her main interests are in balancing the rights and freedoms of individuals with our collective responsibilities to each other, the transparency of both government and corporations, and the role of courage and compassion in civil society.

Anna 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.

Anna is a Board Member of the University of Melbourne Foundation, and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Technology Sydney.

Anna is a member of the Folio Prize Academy.

She is a member of PEN International, both its Australian and US chapters. In 2007 she was chosen to deliver a PEN 3 Writers Lecture.

Public appearances and named lectures

Funder’s essays, articles and columns have appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Ny Tid, and have been selected for Best Australian Essays. Her feature "Secret History", which appeared in the Guardian and in the GoodWeekend, about the files from the Nazi death camps held in obscurity by German authorities, won the 2007 ASA Maunder Award for Journalism.

Funder has delivered numerous named lectures, including the:

Awards and honors

Full list of awards:

Full list of nominations: