Anna Funder on the magic curtain of language, her life in writing, 'Stasiland' thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell and what she’s working on now.

Anna Funder is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and celebrated writers. Her multi-award winning novel All That I Am wasan homage to four extraordinary German anti-Hitler activists in exile in London in the 1930s. It won the Miles Franklin Prize, spent over one and a half years on the bestseller list, and is being made into a feature film. Anna’s Stasiland tells true stories of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for the Stasi. A contemporary classic, Stasiland won the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction in English. Tom Hanks called it ‘fascinating, entertaining, hilarious, horrifying and very important’. Both books are international bestsellers, published in over 24 countries. In 2016 Anna published The Girl with the Dogs, a poignantly beautiful short story inspired by Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dogs. Anna is a former DAAD Fellow in Berlin, Australia Council Fellow, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. She lives in Sydney.