Anna Funder

Anna Funder (born 1966) is an Australian author. She is the author of '' Stasiland'' and '' All That I Am'' and the novella ''The Girl With the Dogs''.

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 for the Arts, NSW Writing and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow.

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

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 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" (''Times Literary Supplement''), "a beautiful ensemble novel of Graham Green’esque proportions" (''Weekendavisen'' (Denmark)) and "an essential novel" by Colum 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
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