Anna Funder’s towering success
Her best-selling novel All that I Am, born in the UTS Tower, is set to reach even greater heights when it hits the big screen.
All That I Am is the award-winning novel of UTS alumna Anna Funder, one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers.
Set during Hitler’s rise to power prior to World War II, the plot follows fearless real-life anti-Nazi activist Dora Fabian, narrated by characters from two separate times in her life – her lover German playwright Ernst Toller in 1939, and her cousin Ruth Blatt in the present-day. With a star-studded cast, the film adaption will see Vanessa Redgrave play the older Ruth, Eliza Scanlen the young Ruth and Evan Rachel Wood as Dora.
Borne out of the creative component of her Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA) Degree at UTS, Anna started researching and writing the novel in 2006, a time she credits as “completely fundamental to my career and one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
Filming is about to get underway in London, Berlin and Australia under the direction of Kate Dennis (The Handmaid’s Tale, Glow).
The path to writing
With a combined Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Law (Honours) degree and Master of Arts under her belt by the mid-1990s, Anna forged an impressive career in human rights law, negotiating treaties with Australia and giving constitutional law advice under the Keating administration.
“I got to where I wanted to be with human rights law, and I enjoyed it, but in the end, I just wanted to write books,” she says.
Her interest in human rights and the role of courage and compassion in civil society heavily influence her writing.
“I’m interested in writing stories of the real world. Books that are a good read and a work of art, but also an intervention into histories that have been overlooked, or that haven’t been written. All That I Am explores a very early, previously unknown story of Jewish resistance to Hitler. With recent assassinations in London and the current war [in the Ukraine], I think it’s more important now than ever before to tell stories that were swept under the carpet.”
Not one to do things by halves, Anna’s also working on the TV series adaptation of her inaugural work, Stasiland, to be written by Australian playwright and screenwriter Andrew Bovell. She's an executive producer on both projects.
“There’s a real hunger for content at the moment, so it’s an exciting time,” she says.
New book in the works
When she’s not editing film scripts, Anna continues to write. Her latest work, WIFEDOM: The Invisible Life of Orwell’s First Wife, is a non-fiction account of the overlooked life of George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, with recently discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend forming the basis for the book.
Five years (and counting) in the making, research has taken Anna all over Europe, including the farmhouse where Orwell wrote 1984. Anna recently returned from being a visiting scholar at Oxford University where she was working on the project.
“This is the story of what it is to be a wife, and the types of work women all around the world do today to hold families together – a global invisibility within patriarchy, which sustains both it—and all of us,” Anna says.
“I’m taking a very particular story about a writer’s wife who was extraordinarily clever and important, yet utterly forgotten. It’s a matter of trying to understand the mechanisms of invisibility generally— as making visible this remarkable woman.”
WIFEDOM: The Invisible Life of Orwell’s First Wife will be published by Penguin Random House in Australia, the UK and the USA in 2023.
The UTS connection
Though she has graduated to a bigger creative space than the tiny pocket of the Tower from where she wrote All That I Am, Anna is proud to maintain her connection to UTS.
“For the work I do it’s extremely important to have access to a library, archives and researchers. You can do anything from UTS these days, and it’s wonderful to be on campus with a hub of creative writers.”
As a part-time staff member in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, she gives guest lectures and co-runs the Vice-Chancellor’s Democracy Forum, which examines the impact of global politics, big tech trends and culture on democracy world-wide and in Australia.
Her advice to budding writers is ‘just write’.
“You need to go with your gut. Find something that makes you intensely curious and that will be worth your time to find out about. That interest and curiosity gives you the energy to make it interesting for others.”
