‘Looking for Eileen: How George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story’
The Girl with the Dogs
“There were, of course, standard-issue affairs, where people seemed so relieved to be able to feel again the overwhelming love they’d felt when young for their spouse that this feeling in itself made them feel young again—only with someone else’s spouse.”
Amid the debris of her friends’ relationships, Tess has a marriage that’s comparatively unscathed. But she’s at a hinge moment, poised between her present life and the one she decided against in her youth. What could she have made of her life had she chosen differently? And what will she risk to find out?
Deceptively concise, The Girl with the Dogs is a masterful story about life from beginning to end, and about the brief moments of choice that have enduring consequences.
Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’, first published in 1899, was hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the greatest stories ever written. The Girl with the Dogs is Anna Funder’s homage to the master.
The stories are published together in a beautiful hardback.
Feature journalism & essays
Anna’s work has been published in magazines and newspapers around the world including The Guardian, The Monthly, The Paris Review Daily, Vogue, and Sydney Morning Herald. In the mid-2000s she wrote a column, alternating with Anna Politkovskaya before her assassination in 2006, for the Norwegian magazine Ny Tid. Over 2013-4 she wrote from New York the Backpage for GoodWeekend.
Her work has been selected for Best Australian Essays and her feature ‘Secret History’, the files from the Nazi death camps won the ASA Maunder Award for journalism.
GoodWeekend – The Backpage
The Guardian
Looking for Eileen: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story’
Sydney Morning Herald
The Monthly
Court Order (On Aboriginal Netballers)
Not My Type (on Personality Type Testing)
The Means of Production (On the uses of Burlesque)
Confidence Trick (Combating patriarchy play-by-play in the Sydney Theatre Company)
Bad Hotel
Selected for Best Australian Science Writing
All Bogans Here (on the smart, tit-flashing not-so-underclass of Aussie)
Longform
Stasiland Now
The Monthly, December 2019
Courage, PEN Three Writers series
In 2008, Sydney PEN commissioned the Three Writers series, in which three of our leading and acclaimed writers — Anna Funder, Melissa Lucashenko and Christopher Kremmer — tackled topics of vital importance to Australia: courage, survival and greed.
What I Owe
Introduction to US reissue of Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River, Melville House, New York, 2015
Secret History
Published in The Guardian UK and the GoodWeekend. Winner of the ASA Maunder Prize for Journalism
‘Why, since the end of the war, have millions of documents from the Nazi regime been locked up in a German archive, access denied to victims and their families? Anna Funder investigates.’
Shorter pieces
Killing Time
Introduction to Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll’s The Train Was On Time, Penguin Random House UK 2019.
Thirty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall who really won?, Sydney Morning Herald
What is Civil Society?
Read Anna’s contribution to the Civil Society Project, alongside filmmaker Ken Loach, poet Andrew Motion and playwright Caryl Phillips, among many others from all walks of life.
I Can Keep You Near — a letter to my late mother, Sydney Morning Herald
On Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and the issuing of Go Set A Watchman, Sydney Morning Herald
The Lives of Others, The Guardian UK
It is a superb film, a thing of beauty. But its story is a fantasy narrative that could not have taken place (and never did) under the GDR dictatorship. The film has, then, an odd relation to historical truth, a truth that is being bitterly fought for now.