Anna Funder

Anna Funder is an Australian author best known for Stasiland (2003), a non-fiction account of her encounters with East Germans and former Stasi officers in the years after reunification, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize. Her debut novel All That I Am (2011) won the Miles Franklin Award and was an international bestseller. All That I Am is a fictionalised account of real events: the exile in London of a group of German anti-Nazi activists in the 1930s, centred on the figure of Ruth Becker and the playwright Ernst Toller. The novel weaves together historical research and imaginative fiction to explore resistance, courage, and betrayal. Funder studied law and German literature in Melbourne and Munich and worked as a lawyer and then as a researcher for SBS television before turning to writing full-time. Her subsequent novel Wifedom (2023) examines the erasure of women from literary history through the lens of Sonia Blair, George Orwell's wife. She lives in Sydney.