In the summer of 2017, Australian writer Anna Funder had hit “peak overload”, dragged down by the weight of domestic duties crowding out her work deadlines. Her frustrations came to a head one day after yet another “soul-sapping” trip to a mall to get groceries because that was just part of being a wife, mother and multitasking homemaker.
But it had all tipped over into a mad scramble for time and space. Funder’s husband, Craig Allchin, was a busy architect, but she was a busy professional, too – as a writer, a translator of French and German, which she speaks fluently, and a documentary film-maker. She is currently attached to the University of Technology Sydney’s creative writing school as a researcher.
Her portfolio of roles came after working as a human rights lawyer in the Australian attorney-general’s office in Canberra until the mid-90s, when she stunned her colleagues by quitting the job to move, alone, to Berlin to pursue her dream of becoming a writer.
The result was the publication of her first book, Stasiland (2002), a courageous investigation of the Stasi security apparatus, which terrorised the people of East Germany for 40 years. In 2004, the book won the British Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
Her debut novel, (2011), about a group
