Author receives British honor

The Australian author of the book “Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall” has won Britain’s richest literary prize for nonfiction. Anna Funder was awarded the $59,000 Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction on Tuesday. It is the former lawyer and TV producer’s first book.

In awarding the prize, the judges said that Funder unearths “extraordinary tales from the underbelly” of the former East Germany. The prize is sponsored by the British Broadcasting Corp.

Funder defeated American author Bill Bryson for his bestseller “A Short History of Nearly Everything” and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag: A History of the Soviet State.”

Both had been short-listed for the prize, which celebrates originality and diversity in contemporary nonfiction publishing.

Funder, who lives in Sydney, visits the man who painted the line that became the Berlin Wall, meets the woman accused of potentially sparking a conflict by trying to cross the border and gets drunk with the “Mik Jegger” of the East.

The judges said the book contained “wonderful flashes of humor, despite the sobering subject matter.”