Miles Franklin Award-winning novelist Anna Funder is fed up with wealthy media companies expecting her to work for nothing.

“They just think somehow that exposure is a good thing in itself, as if you are running some sort of porn site – where in that case exposure might be a good thing in itself – but it’s not for me,” she told Australia’s first national writers’ congress.

“That’s a very quick race to the bottom.”

Ms Funder said vast fortunes are being made on the internet by companies on-selling data rather than paying for content.

“The thing that affects me is people constantly asking me to do things for free,” she said.

“Major world newspapers will ask you to write for them. They don’t even apologise for not offering to pay you any more.”

‘We deserve to be paid’

The Manhattan-based author won international acclaim for her first book, Stasiland, about the secret police in East Germany, and her first novel, All That I Am, which won a swag of prizes last year, including the Miles Franklin Award for fiction.

But the mother of three young children said authors must be paid and society “can’t afford” not to pay for quality writing.

“Like everybody else in society, we are doing something useful, something that has value,” she said.

“It has a kind of political value of speaking truth to power, it has an aesthetic value of giving pleasure and delight. And we deserve to be paid.

“We also deserve to be able to function in the world as human beings with children and mortgages – and they cost money.”

Loose copyright, online content threatening writers’ livelihoods

The Australian Society of Authors staged the Sydney congress to highlight a financial crisis facing writers and to look for solutions.

Writers’ incomes have halved in the last decade, from a peak of $23,000 per year in 2001.

Free content on the internet and a loosening of copyright control threatens livelihoods even further.

Ms Funder is working on a new novel and is also among a group of authors who have contributed to a new anthology about dispossession – A Country Too Far, edited by Tom Keneally and Rosie Scott.

The Melbourne-born writer said Australia had successful multicultural policies that were reflected in society, but that she was saddened by the recent treatment of asylum seekers.

“It saddens me to think we are not recognising people who have an absolute legal right, a human right, to come and seek asylum here and we are denying them that, that we are locking up men, women and children in prison camps and they haven’t done anything wrong,” she said.

A former constitutional lawyer, Ms Funder criticised the Government’s legal action to prevent asylum seekers landing in Australia.

“The absurdity of excising mainland Australia from the Migration Act that would allow them to claim asylum boggles my mind and makes me very sad,” she said.