Rebecca Donner is the author of the New York Times bestseller All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler (Little, Brown and Company, 2021), a deeply researched fusion of biography, espionage thriller, and scholarly detective story about her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack, an American graduate student who became a leader in Berlin’s underground resistance during Hitler’s regime. The book won the Chautauqua Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. The book was selected as one of the best of the year by the Economist, the New York Times, Time magazine, and the Wall Street Journal, and it was serialized by BBC Radio 4.

The work she is undertaking at Harvard Radcliffe Institute is a genre-defying biography of Sophie Scholl, an anti-Nazi political activist.

Donner was a 2023 visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2018–2019 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Her other books include two critically acclaimed works of fiction, and she is a graduate of the Columbia University MFA Writing Program.