Anna Funder is mere days into her new role at the University of Sydney when we meet there on an overcast Friday afternoon; she waves vaguely in the direction of her new office and says she hasn’t yet unpacked. So, with her encouragement, I gamely agree to play tour guide around my alma mater and continue to until, about halfway through the interview, she starts telling me about the architecture – at which point it becomes clear how her easy and self-effacing manner can function as a smokescreen for the sharpness of her mind.
As we set off past the beds of majestic fig trees and the manicured lawns surrounding the university’s sandstone quadrangle, passing backpacked students and fresh graduates posing for photos, I ask the newly installed professor of practice in creative writing what her own experience of studying creative writing was like. She looks stricken: “We’re starting with a confession.
“I have good friends who teach creative writing, and I love to talk to them, but I’ve never actually been taught it,” she says.
Funder had no creative writing practice when she quit her job in international law for the Australian government to embark on Stasiland, her award-winning examination of the fallout of East Germany’s surveillance state, based on interviews with perpetrators and survivors. Published in 2002, it won the UK’s prestigious Samuel Johnson prize for nonfiction (now the Baillie Gifford), and has been published in more than 28 countries.
“I mean, I clearly didn’t know what I was doing. But I did have an honours degree in English literature, and I had been reading my entire life. I always knew that I was going to write.”
When asked if it was hard to write, she replies “No, not really” – though later concedes writing is “like childbirth – you forget the effort of it”.
Stasiland germinated in the late 80s when Funder was a 20-year-old exchange student in what was then still West Berlin. What started with casual conversations with German friends turned into an insatiable desire to understand not only how citizens could turn on each other but how certain individuals refuse to – often at huge personal cost.
“They were living under a bell jar in an enclosed society, under this male tyranny of the Stasi, and they still said no,” she says of three such women, who became the basis of Stasiland. “I just think to do that is incredible.”
Funder secured various fellowships to return to Germany through the 1990s, probing further into the subject matter. “And then in 1997, I left the law, left my boyfriend, left the country, left my career and said to everyone ‘I’m going to Berlin to write a book!’ I was basically painting myself into this unbelievably difficult corner where I would have no option but to write my way out,” she says. Her eyes widen: “I kind of can’t believe no one stopped me.”
Looking at her now, it’s easy to imagine a formidable young lawyer, radiating confidence and brooking no interference. When I say something to this effect, she releases a self-deprecating laugh – “I doubt it” – and deflects, pausing at the side entrance to the main quadrangle to tell me about the gargoyles hemming the portico arch.
Funder poses for photos during our walk with the supreme but seemingly effortless poise of someone accustomed to the limelight, though she later admits to feeling “completely invisible” as she approaches 60.
The same diffidence is in evidence when I describe her books as the product of deep work and she says “I’m always a bit ashamed at how long my books take”.
Stasiland, published in 2002 when she was 35 (and breastfeeding her first child) took four years; All That I Am, the Miles Franklin award-winning fictionalised account of real-life resistance, set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, was published a decade later; Wifedom, her third full-length book, about the “invisible life” of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s wife and key (uncredited) collaborator, and the patriarchal system that occluded her, was published in 2023. All centre on women and heroic acts of resistance against totalitarianism, and deal with the deceptive nature and pernicious ongoing influence of official history. All were based on deep, labour-intensive research, two of them undertaken while she was raising children and juggling domestic labour within her marriage (as she explores in Wifedom).
Seen in this light, Funder’s new role could be interpreted as an act of support for writing as a careful, labour-intensive, vital craft.
Funder feels the significance of her appointment at a broader level. “The university putting me in here is a vote of confidence in the humanities in an age of technocrats, AI, the rise of the right, book burnings and bannings. It’s not just about creative writing, although that is a very pointy end of it,” she says. “More broadly it says: we think universities are here in general to be a place for creative thought of all kinds, and debate – and we’re going to put this person in here to talk about that.
“And I could talk about that till the cows come home,” she says, “because I think that’s where our humanity lives: in this deep respect for everybody’s creativity.”
It’s the first time in our conversation that I witness the steel the writer displayed at a Senate inquiry in September about the importance of defending authors against the onslaught from AI, an Instagram video which garnered a comment from Sharon Stone, who called Funder a “bad ass”. (“I thought that was really funny because she’s the OG badass, right?” she laughs).
Funder is less badass when it comes to rain, however, and as the sprinkle progresses to a drizzle, we take shelter in the cloisters, taking advantage of one of the faux-marble cocktail tables set up for a graduation event, complete with celebratory balloon cluster. “It’s like they anticipated us!” she laughs with delight.
When I ask her where her sense of social justice stems from, she doesn’t hesitate: “I don’t think I had a choice; that’s just the family background that I come from.”
Her mother was a psychologist who undertook studies that shaped policies such as mandatory child support payments from non-custodial parents; her father was an endocrinologist. “They had this enormous sense of working professionally and personally for two things: searching for truth, firstly, and the purpose of that was social justice – making things better.”
However, she doesn’t see her own work as driven by social justice. When I point out that each of her books deals with the dynamics between systems of power and disenfranchised individuals, she concedes but says “I think that’s the angle that I’ve taken to explore what it is to be human … You’re looking at somebody under a microscope in an extreme situation, and seeing how they behave.” She laughs: “In that way I guess it’s like my dad’s scientific experiments.”
Her upbringing inspired her creative practice in a more fundamental way too: “It was all about intellect and argument, and a kind of Socratic to and fro at the dinner table – and it was absolutely not about feeling. And so I think, from a very early age, I was reading to explore a whole world of human emotion.” In high school, she says, the experience of reading and analysing a novel “would literally feel like there were lights going off in my head… I’ve never been in any other situation where that has happened.”
She’s currently working on a new book: “A novel that is contemporary and quite personal. I would like it to be something that requires no research, but we will see,” she says, with a smile.
“I like to write from a place of admiration. So even if the person on the page becomes a character and is not quite like the person in real life, that original sense of awe about who they were or what they did or how they behaved in a certain situation is a very happy place for me to write from.”
She hesitates and then the words rush out: “I feel this is examining my own psychology, which I don’t like doing very much. But that’s where I think I’m coming from.” The new novel, she says, also starts from this place. “But we’ll see what happens.”
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Anna Funder is touring Australian capital cities in July and August 2026