Imagining The Past: In conversation with Anna Funder
In our Summer/Autumn Imagining the Past season, we present selected sessions from our 2023 HNSA Conference. Enjoy RN's The Bookshelf host, Kate Evans, in conversation with Guest of Honour, Anna Funder, about the challenges of writing a blend of fiction and non-fiction in Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, a book about George Orwell's wife, Eileen Blair.
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About Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
This is the story of the marriage behind some of the most famous literary works of the 20th century —and a probing consideration of what it means to be a wife and a writer in the modern world.
Eileen O’Shaughnessy married George Orwell in 1936. O’Shaughnessy was a writer herself, and her literary brilliance not only shaped Orwell’s work, but her practical common sense saved his life. But why and how, Anna Funder wondered, was she written out of their story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder re-creates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War in London. As she peeks behind the curtain of Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer—and what it is to be a wife.
A breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the twentieth century, Wifedom speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past. Genre-bending and utterly original, it is an ode to the unsung work of women everywhere.
About Anna Funder
Anna Funder is the author of Stasiland, All That I Am and Wifedom – each book an international bestseller, published in many countries – and the novella The Girl with the Dogs. Her books have won multiple literary awards, including the UK’s premier award for non-fiction, the Samuel Johnson Prize, for Stasiland; Australia’s most prestigious, the Miles Franklin, for her novel All That I Am; and the renowned French prize the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, for Wifedom.
Originally trained as an international human rights lawyer, Anna has lived in Melbourne, Paris, Berlin and New York City. She now lives with her family in Sydney.
Connect with her at www.annafunder.com
About the podcast
The Imagining the Past podcast series features authors appearing at the Historical Novel Society Australasia biennial conferences or who have been recognised in our $150,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize.
Our hosts, Kelly Gardiner and Greg Johnston, discuss researching, writing and publishing historical fiction with acclaimed writers of the genre in its many forms from crime to fantasy to literary fiction, set in eras stretching from ancient times to the Swinging Sixties, and for readers of all ages.
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