She is the author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, which won the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, and The Chautauqua Prize[1][2] She was a 2023 Visiting Scholar at Oxford,[3] and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of her contribution to historical scholarship.
[5] Donner was born in Canada, and during childhood lived in Japan, Michigan, Virginia, and California.
[10] She wrote “Sunset Terrace,” a novel set in Los Angeles, followed by “Burnout,” a graphic novel about ecoterrorism.
[9] 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.
[17] Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird praised the book as "a stunning literary achievement.