Anna Funder

Anna Funder
Anna Funder on Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2012
Born	1966 (age 50–51) Melbourne, Australia
Residence	New York
Education	BA (Hons) LLB (Hons) MA, DCA (Creative Writing)
Occupation	Writer
Parent(s)	John Funder

Anna Funder (born 1966) is an Australian author. She is the author of Stasiland and All That I Am.

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.

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.