The University of Sydney has appointed award-winning writer Anna Funder as a Professor of Practice in Creative Writing.
The new role is designed to strategically bridge research with practice, advancing critical and creative writing across humanities disciplines while enhancing the university’s national and international reputation.
Funder will also supervise higher degree research students, contribute to curriculum and speaker programs where appropriate, support student and staff engagement with the writing and publishing industries and represent the University of Sydney at major national and international events including writers’ festivals and media forums. Additionally, Funder plans to work on a major creative work during her time with the University.
‘I am thrilled and deeply honoured to be joining the University of Sydney as Professor of Practice in the School of Art, Communication and English,’ Professor Funder said.
‘I have spent my working life trying to understand the world by writing about it, creating works of literature designed to inform, to bear witness and to delight. Often, these have been true stories of ordinary people, dealing with an overwhelming world.
‘In our time of information surfeit on the one hand, and fake news on the other, literature fosters deep human understanding and knowledge. It feeds the human spirit, and it connects us across difference.
‘I could not be more delighted to be joining VC Mark Scott and the extraordinarily gifted and dedicated colleagues at the University of Sydney. I am enormously grateful for the breadth of vision of this appointment. I am looking forward to contributing to the university’s research, scholarship and public engagement missions, and to working with the other creative writers and thinkers across the humanities at the University.’
Funder: an important public voice
Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Mark Scott said Professor Funder was one of Australia’s most important literary and public voices. ‘Anna Funder is one of Australia’s most significant writers and public thinkers, and we are honoured to welcome her to the University of Sydney,’ Professor Scott said.
‘Her work has shaped how readers around the world understand power, conscience and moral courage. This appointment reflects our commitment to the role universities must play in strengthening public culture, democratic debate and civic life.
‘Anna brings extraordinary intellectual authority, creative ambition and public trust. She embodies the kind of engagement we want to see between scholarship and society.’
Funder is one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers of fiction and non-fiction. Her internationally bestselling books Stasiland and All That I Am illuminate the human condition through true stories of courage and resistance, conscience and love. They have been published in 25 countries, won major literary awards and been optioned for stage and screen in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Her most recent book, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of 2023. It received France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 2024 and has been widely praised as a landmark work of literary biography.
Head of the School of Art, Communication and English Associate Professor Andrew Lavery said the appointment would have a direct impact on students.
‘For students, this is a remarkable opportunity to engage with a writer of significant international impact and standing,’ Associate Professor Lavery said.
‘Anna brings a strong sense of writing’s significance in the world and her generosity as a mentor, and commitment to craft will be hugely valuable to our English and Writing students.’
Professor Funder said the School of Art, Communication and English works to equip students to understand the world through art and communication and to explore how people perceive the world and express themselves. ‘These aims could not be closer to my heart,’ she said. ‘I look forward to contributing to scholarship, to mentoring and teaching, and to the making of new literature for our times, from the University of Sydney.’
A former international human rights lawyer, Professor Funder left the legal industry to explore human nature through literature. She is a highly regarded public intellectual and speaker, with extensive experience delivering lectures, commencement addresses and major public interviews around the world.
Professor Funder holds a Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Technology Sydney, an MA in Creative Writing and a BA/LLB (Hons) from the University of Melbourne. Her works have won many major national and international literary awards including the Samuel Johnson (Baillie Gifford) Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger.
Professor Funder has been a Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, Wolfson College, a DAAD Artist-in-Residence in Berlin, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio. Anna has written for publications including The Guardian, TIME and The Paris Review, speaks fluent French and German, and lives in Sydney.
In 2025, all three of her major works were voted by Australians into the ABC’s Top 100 Books of the Century.
