She sat down with ABC Arts to chat about AI, the state of democracy and her favourite Australian books. You trained as a lawyer, so how did you end up becoming a writer? I always wanted to be a writer [but] I'm very happy that I did law. I think it equipped me well for certain situations — facing down Stasi men who wanted to lecture me about human rights in their system. What drew you to write your first book about the East German Stasi? The [Berlin] wall fell in '89, so not long after I was there; I left in '88 When I was telling it — I started writing it in 2006, it was published in 2011 — all the people in it were dead and I felt less beholden to real people