Anna Funder (born 1966) is an Australian author. Funder's novel Stasiland (2003) won the 2004 UK's Summer Johnson Prize - which is now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction - for best piece of non-fiction published in the English language. Her 2012 novel All That I Am won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life (2023) was a Sunday Times Bestseller as soon as it was released in August 2023. It received France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 2024. Hailed as "electrifying" by Kirkus Reviews (starred review) and "a spellbinding achievement" by the Financial Times, Wifedom was a New York Times Notable Book of 2023, and named a Book of the Year by The Guardian, the Independent, the Economist, LitHub, the Telegraph, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, and the Times.
Life Anna Funder was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1966. Funder's father is endocrinologist Professor John Funder, and her mother was the late psychologist Dr Kate Funder. Funder was educated in both Paris and Melbourne. She graduated Dux of Star of the Sea College in Brighton, Victoria 1983.
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. Funder holds a BA in English literature, German and law; an LLB (Hons); and an MA in creative writing from the University of Melbourne.
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).
Funder speaks French and German fluently.
Funder has also been involved extensively in 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.
Funder was invited in 2026 by Thinkable to conduct a speaking tour across Australia, addressing sold out Town Hall venues Melbourne and Sydney, and other cities.
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. In the 1990s Funder worked as "Counsel in International and Human Rights law for the Australian Government". She worked on Section 52 of the Constitution, on human rights, and on constitutional law; and for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade on international treaty negotiations. Other activities included a focus on the rights of a child and environmental protections.
Funder ended her career in law when she moved from Australia to live in Berlin and write full-time in the late 1990s. She has said that she had always wanted to be a writer, but her training in law had equipped her well for situations in which she later found herself.
Funder has maintained an ongoing commitment to human rights through her work as an Ambassador for the International Cities of Refuge Network, a network that offers places of refuge for writers and journalists who are persecuted in their countries of origin
Journalism Funder's essays, feature articles and columns have appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Paris Review, Best Australian Essays, Die Zeit, and The Monthly.
Funder 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.
Family Funder is married to Craig Allchin and has three children.
Writing Funder "explores the space between the conscience and the soul" (Scotland on Sunday). Donna Rifkind, in the Wall Street Journal notes that "Funder shows that radical compassion - which is not the same as forgiveness - will move one closer to understanding, in marriage and biography, every time". Funder has said that "the central aesthetic and political preoccupation of my life is the question of how a human being can recognise and resist illegitimate power".
Funder's undergraduate dissertation, supervised by Professor Hilary Charlesworth, was published in an American scholarly journal, and has been cited many times, including in submissions to the Australian Parliament.
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 tells the previously untold story of four German-Jewish anti-Hitler activists forced to flee Berlin for London, where 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. Two of the activists were found dead in 1935. On account of the British policy of appeasement, the inquest into their deaths was a whitewash. Although based on a true story, Funder allowed herself more artistic licence to dramatise it, as the people involved were dead.
The book was very well received by critics, including the Times Literary Supplement), which called it "strong and impressively humane", and The Wall Street Journal, which called it "imaginative, compassionate, and convincing". It won Australia's most prestigious fiction prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award. The Spectator hailed it as "superb". Weekendavisen called the novel "a beautiful ensemble novel of Graham Green'esque proportions".
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.
Awards Received
Miles Franklin Award, 2012 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards - 2011 Fiction Award and People's Choice Award Barbara Jefferis Award The Indie Book Awards Best Debut Fiction Australian Book Industry Award (ABIA) Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2012 Nielson BookData Bookseller's Choice Award
Awards Nominated
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Asher Literary Award Commonwealth Book Prize Prime Minister's Literary Award ALS Gold Medal Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature - Fiction Prize Victorian Premier's Literary Award Queensland Literary Awards
The Girl with the Dogs In July 2015 Funder published a novella titled The Girl with the Dogs.
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life
Wifedom was published on 4 July 2023 in the United Kingdom, The United States of America, and Australia. Funder's 2023 book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life is a biography of George Orwell's first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy. EIleen studied at The University of Oxford under the tutelage of Mary Ethel Seaton and J.R.R. Tolkien. Eileen was active in Spain at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Concentrating on propaganda, she worked at the International Labour Party's Head Office.
Funder shows how Orwell and his biographers minimised or eliminated her contributions her husband's work and life, as well as that of other women, including his mother and aunt. 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". Eileen supported the couple through her work at the Censorship Department in the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Food. Eileen also worked closely with George Orwell on the composition of Animal Farm.
The novel was an instant Sunday Times Bestseller on release in August 2023 and it was awarded France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger 2024. It also received the ABIA (Australian Book Industry Award) Biography Book of the Year Award for 2024, and the BookPeople (Book Data) 2024 Non-Fiction Book of the Year. 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. Wifedom was also featured on the Book of the Week series for BBC 4.
Robert McCrum called Wifedom "[o]ne of the most startling explorations of life-writing (Eileen's, Orwell's and Funder's) in recent times ... Wifedom is a genre-bending tour-de-force that resurrects an invisible woman, and relitigates the saintly image of the man she called "Eric" ... a moving, forensic act of biographical reconstruction". Sarah Bakewell in a New York Times review described it as "[a] virtuoso performance on the theme, adding personal memoir, some fictional reconstructions and a glittering sense of purpose". Geraldine Brooks, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, labelled it as "a masterpiece", saying that "Anna Funder not only re-makes the art of biography, she resurrects a woman in full. And this in a narrative that grips the reader and unfolds through some of the most consequential moments - historical and cultural - of the twentieth century".
There was, however, a negative reaction from members of The Orwell Society, such as Quentin Kopp, who accused Funder of attacking Orwell. 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." Funder comments that The Orwell Society would prefer to "think about Orwell as he wanted to think of himself: as a decent, upstanding, heterosexual man". She also thinks that someone "who was so vanilla could never have had the vision, say, for Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is paranoid and sadistic and wonderful for us".
Awards
2024: Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger 2024: ABIA (Australian Book Industry Award) Biography Book of the Year. 2024: BookPeople (Book Data) 2024 Non-Fiction Book of the Year.
Nominated
2024: Prix Femina (shortlisted) 2024: Prix Médicis (shortlisted) 2024: ELLE Grand Prix des Lectrices (shortlisted) 2024: FNAC Prix du Roman 2024: Women's Prize (longlisted) 2024: Gordon Burn Prize (shortlisted) 2024: NIB Award (shortlisted) 2024: Indie Book Awards (shortlisted)
Academia In 2022, Funder was a part-time staff member in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS. With emeritus professor Roy Green, she was co-founder and then co-administrator of the vice-chancellor's Democracy Forum, which examines the impact of global politics, AI and other technology, and culture on democracy around the world. She established the university's international speaker series.