The Miles Franklin winner on the joys of writing, why she returned to Australia after three years living in New York and the illusion of freedom in America

Anna Funder on life in the US: 'I underestimated what a radically different culture it has'

Anna Funder has been back in Australia for just a few weeks. Her three kids are enrolled in school in Sydney – “they look like something out of Hogwarts,” she says – and she’s trying to catch up with friends she hasn’t seen for ages. On the day we meet she apologises for the state of her overstimulated brain but says she’s happy, very happy, to be home.

Funder and her husband, the urban designer Craig Allchin, decided three and a half years living in New York was enough. The main reason was their children Imogen, 13, Polly, 11 and Max, six.



“My kids are of an age where we had to decide whether they were going to be American or whether they were going to be Australian,” she says. “We decided that we really want them to be Australian.



“I think you don’t choose your parents and you don’t choose your nationality, and those bonds are incredibly deep and formative in ways that certainly about my nation I couldn’t realise until I left.



“There was absolutely no way Craig and I could ever become American in any real sense, whereas our kids were definitely on the way to feeling American, speaking American. I had underestimated what a radically different culture it is from here.”



All That I Am by Anna Funder – review Read more

Here is inner Sydney, the endlessly busy Parramatta Road, in a cafe called Deus. This was where Funder wrote much of All that I Am, her astonishing first novel inspired by the true story of Jewish Germans who fled to London in the 1930s and from there tried to warn the world about Hitler. It won Australia’s premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin, in 2012.



So far, Funder has barely had a chance to notice whether she sees Australia anew. She has noticed with annoyance the coffee in Sydney costs $4. And the taxi driver on the way home from the airport talked to her family like they were real people, and how he declined a tip. She noticed the local paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, has shrunk to a tabloid.

Like many Australians, Funder had assumed the US would feel similar, but it was strange. It’s to do with history, she says. The key difference is the “sense of a fair go that we have here, rooted in the late 1800s wages disputes where we ended up with an industrial wage setting commission and the Harvester judgment early in the 20th century where we just said ‘we are going to work out the battle between employer and employee in a civilised way so it’s not just constantly strikes and lockouts’.



“We’re going to have a family wage that is going to be a decent wage, and there’s going to be a minimum wage, and there’s going to be an eight-hour day and then from the 70s there’s going to be a universal healthcare system that is largely free.



“Those very basic things allow Australians to have a freedom that Americans, for all of their vaunting of their freedoms, do not have.”



She takes a breath. Funder, 48 is compelling company, polite and generous, with a relentless intellectual curiosity mingled with a kind of vulnerability. You get the impression she soaked up New York, with its writerly culture, but was always analysing it, too.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anna Funder in 2003 when she was included on the Guardian’s first book award shortlist. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

One of her journalist friends in the US lost her job because she disparaged her boss. A lot of American interaction – “have you had a great day?” – is really people in the service sector begging for tips, she says. “Americans have to say that they’re free because they are so unfree there, and they are unfree because there are no basic guarantees of wages or healthcare.”



It is the social justice ethos, however imperfect, that Funder wants for her children. She is midway through writing a novel based in Australia. It will be her first set here, inspired by the tumult of the 1970s, the politics, the social upheaval, the feminism. She hopes for more time to write now her youngest child is at school.

Funder’s first year in New York was spent settling her family in and travelling to promote All that I Am, which was published in 20 countries. She did some journalism and worked for a charity called Icorn, the International Cities of Refuge Network that offers shelter for artists and writers facing persecution in their home countries, and continues to work with other writers such as Tom Keneally to lobby Melbourne and Sydney to become Icorn cities.



She wrote a novella last year, The Girl with the Dogs, funded by the pearling company Paspaley as an e-book. Penguin has just published it in book form.



The novella is a shift for Funder. All that I Am and her first book, the best-selling Stasiland, were concerned with extraordinary historical events and the bravery of people who held to principle despite the cost. The Girl with the Dogs has a smaller canvas and is a loose companion piece to Anton Chekhov’s short story The Lady with the Dog.



That involves a 40-year-old man’s affair with a much younger woman. Funder upends that to tells the story of the woman when she herself is older, married with children, living in Sydney, and curious about the earlier affair. These days, finding an old lover is just a Facebook click away.



“Women in middle age like me end up in a position where you’re kind of pulled every which way, the generation before you needing care and the generation after you still needing their noses wiped,” Funder says.



Review: Stasiland by Anna Funder Read more

She says writing the novella was one of the most enjoyable writing experiences she has had. It was fun, she played with it, the ideas intrigued her. It’s been some years since she’s been obsessed by a book, though, immersed in it to the extent “it becomes the centre of your intellectual life and in some ways your emotional life too”.



“I talked to an agent once who said to me, ‘For every child you lose a book,’ which is such a weird thing to say, really.



“A human being is not an equivalent thing, but the book does take its silent and deadly space at the dinner table, if you like, and it will be another thing that’s in the family.”



Funder is not yet at that point with the novel she is working on but she does want that absorbed feeling. She seems nervous about it, too. There are joys to being home in Australia but she knows it will hurt. As she catches up with friends, she’s noticed “a lot of them are pretty miserable, people on the right and the left, miserable and ashamed”.

In the past she spoke publicly about her horror of the Howard government’s treatment of asylum seekers. If anything the debate is now more rancorous and the international crisis more gut-wrenching.

As someone who worked in human rights law before becoming a writer, she feels an obligation to be involved but hasn’t quite caught up with the details of how Australia is treating asylum seekers and has a fear of being so sensitive to current events it prevents her from writing.

“Some things are just so awful, I don’t know, I’m not quite sure how I’m going to compartmentalise that,” she says.

“It can be kind of gutting, because if I’m writing about this country which I love on lots of levels, then I need to be aware of ugliness and human ugliness and political ugliness and all of those things but not be overcome by those things.”



She’s not in tears but her voice wavers a little. It might be the exhaustion, or something else.

“It’s an emotional thing writing a novel. If I was a political activist I’d be out there, but I’m not. I’ll do what I can.”

• The Girl with the Dogs is published by Penguin