Rebecca Donner

Donner was born in Canada, and during childhood lived in Japan, Michigan, Virginia, and California.[5][6] She received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley and MFA from Columbia University.[7][8] She taught writing at Wesleyan University.[9] She wrote “Sunset Terrace,” a novel set in Los Angeles, followed by “Burnout,” a graphic novel about ecoterrorism.[8]

In 2021, Donner published a biography, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, of her great-great-aunt, Mildred Harnack, an American who was part of the Nazi resistance in Germany and was executed in 1943 on Hitler's orders.[6][8][10] The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and The Chautauqua Prize[1][8][11][12][13][14] All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Plutarch Award,[15] and a shortlisted nominee for the Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction at the 2022 Governor General's Awards.[16] Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird praised the book as "a stunning literary achievement."[17][18]

Donner received a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in the general nonfiction category.[19] Donner was a 2023 Visiting Scholar at Oxford.[3] She is currently a 2023-2024 Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.[4]

• 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, Harvard[4]
• 2023 Visiting Scholar, Oxford[3]
• 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship[20]
• 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography[21]
• 2022 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography[22]
• 2022 Chautauqua Prize[1]
• 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, finalist[23]
• 2022 Governor General's Literary Award, finalist[24]
• 2022 Plutarch Award, finalist[25]

• Donner, Rebecca (2021). All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler. New York: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 978-0-316-56169-3.[26][27][11][28]
• Donner, Rebecca (2008). Burnout. New York. ISBN 9781401215378.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)[29]
• Donner, Rebecca (2003). Sunset Terrace. MacAdam/Cage. ISBN 978-1-931561-34-1.[30][31][32]