Anna Funder

Anna Funder (born 1966) is an Australian author. She is best known for her award-winning novels Stasiland, her 2012 novel All That I Am (winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award), and Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life (2023), as well as her human rights advocacy. She has toured extensively talking about her writing as well as human rights issues, giving addresses at named lecture series. In April 2026 she was appointed Professor of Practice in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney

Early life and education Anna Funder was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1966, the daughter of John Funder , an endocrinologist, and Dr Kate Funder, a psychologist. She also has another brother, Hugh.

As an undergraduate of the University of Melbourne, where she studied English literature, German, and law, she was awarded a DAAD scholarship, enabling her to attend the Free University of Berlin in West Berlin in 1987, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She left Berlin in 1988.

In 2006 she started researching and writing her second novel, All That I Am, when she was undertaking the creative component of her work to earn a Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

Career Legal career Funder began her career as an international lawyer for the Australian Government, in the Attorney-General's Department in the Office of International Law. During the 1990s, She has said that she had always wanted to be a writer, but her training in law had equipped her well for situations she later found herself in.

Anna wrote a column for the Norwegian publication Ny Tid, alternating with Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya up until Politkovskaya's assassination in 2006. Funder's feature essay "Secret History" on the Nazi files held in the Arolsen Archives (Bad Arolsen), published in the Good Weekend and The Guardian was awarded the ASA Maunder Award for Journalism in 2007.

Fiction Stasiland

Funder's 2003 Stasiland tells true stories of people who resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi. In 2020 Maurice Frank, of the Berliner Zeitung wrote "Anna Funder's Stasiland has become a classic of the literature on Communist East Germany. Thirty years after reunification, the book could serve as a warning for now". In the New York Times, William Gibson, called it ‘superb’; Tom Hanks called it ‘fascinating, entertaining, hilarious, horrifying and very important’; the London Review of Books called it ‘meticulous and compassionate. . . a heroic act of listening.’

Stasiland has been translated into 25 languages and honoured with publication by the Folio Society. It won the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize (now Baillie Gifford Prize) for best non-fiction published in the English language, 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 reveals the unknown story of one of the earliest acts of Jewish resistance to Hitler. It tells the previously untold story of four German-Jewish anti-Hitler activists forced to flee Berlin for 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. Although based on a true story, Funder allowed herself more artistic licence to dramatise it, as the people involved were dead. and The Wall Street Journal. It won Australia's most prestigious fiction prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Published in 25 countries, 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.

The Girl with the Dogs In July 2015 Funder published a novella titled The Girl with the Dogs.

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life

Her 2023 book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life is a biography of George Orwell's first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Funder says that one of her aims was "to see how men can imagine themselves as innocent in a system that benefits them, at others' cost". and it was awarded France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger 2024. Kirkus Reviews hailed it as "electrifying" and "a spellbinding achievement". It was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and named a Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist, LitHub, the The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, and The Times.

There was, however, a negative reaction from members of The Orwell Society, which includes the couple's adopted son Richard Blair, who thought that her representation of Orwell was unfair. Funder said that she had published facts that had been deliberately hidden, including "his repressed homosexuality, his sadism, his paranoia, his infidelities, his complexity out of which the work comes." She has been an ambassador for the Norwegian-based International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), a global network of cities offering safe havens for persecuted writers.

AI and copyright Funder has been outspoken about AI's illegal copyright theft of material, especially writers' works, including her own. In 2025, together with Julia Powles, Funder published on AI's global misuse of copyright material. She appeared with Tom Keneally and Sally Rippin before a Senate Committee hearing on AI companies' "training" of AI computer programs involving the theft of copyright material. Her appearance went viral, garnering nearly half a million views.

In an interview in July 2026 with Nicola Heath, Funder stated that she believes a "massive crime" to have occurred in the act of various tech firms using the books of the world as the raw data for their AI models without the consent of those books' authors. The book Courage, Survival, Greed was published in May 2009 as part of the project, containing essays by her along with Melissa Lucashenko and Christopher Kremmer, focused on "explor[ing] issues facing contemporary Australia".

Public appearances and lectures Funder has spoken at festivals and events, including literary festivals at Edinburgh, Hay-on-Wye, Jaipur, Cheltenham and writers' festivals in Australia. She was selected by the Jewish Book Council to tour the US with All That I Am, and has toured her books around the world.

She has delivered commencement addresses at universities and given named lectures, including the University of Iceland in Reykjavík. Other lectures and addresses include: Allen Missen Address for Liberty Victoria PEN Three Writers Lecture Dymphna Clark Memorial Lecture 2013 ICORN Oration, Paris, 2013 (with Masha Gessen and John Ralston Saul Judith Wright Oration, University of New England Opening Address IAPP Conference, Washington DC 2024 Closing address "Bears out there", Sydney Writers Festival, May 2025

Awards and recognition

Aside from many awards nominated or won for her three novels mentioned in the articles covering those books, Funder has been the recipient of other awards and recognition, including: Australia Council fellowship University of Melbourne Felix Meyer Creative Writing Award 1987: German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) fellowship 2011: Appointed to the Literature Board of the Australia Council 2011: Listed in The Sydney Morning Herald'''s "100 People of Influence" in Australia 2012: Listed, The Sydney Morning Herald 'Sydney's Top 100 Most Influential People', 2012 2013: InStyle magazine's Woman of Style Award for Arts & Culture 2026: Harper's Bazaar Australia'' Woman of Influence

Personal life Funder lived with her husband, urban designer Craig Allchin, and three children in Brooklyn, New York for three and a half years, before returning to Australia in 2015.

Funder speaks French and German fluently.