Antonella Gambotto-Burke

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Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Antonella Gambotto-Burke (née Antonella Gambotto, born September 19, 1965) is an Australian author and journalist.

Gambotto-Burke has written one novel, The Pure Weight of the Heart, two anthologies, Lunch of Blood and An Instinct for the Kill, and a memoir, The Eclipse, which has been published in three languages and is due to be published in two more in 2008. The Eclipse concerns her brother's suicide and her engagement to, and the death of, the late GQ editor Michael VerMeulen. Her best known comic interview - with Warwick Capper, a retired Australian footballer, and his wife - is included in The Best Australian Profiles (Black, 2004). "The best profiles lodge deep in the public mind, such as ... Antonella Gambotto's cheerfully dopey Warwick and Joanne Capper, which presaged by years the arrival of Kath & Kim", wrote a critic in The Age on June 18, 2005. She is also a member of Mensa.[1]

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[edit] Biography

Gambotto-Burke was born and raised on Sydney's North Shore, the first child and only daughter of Giancarlo Gambotto, whose lawsuit against WCP Ltd. changed Australian corporate law, made the front pages of The Australian Financial Review and The Australian, and is still featured in corporate law exams.

She was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald at the age of fifteen - a satire of poet Les Murray's "An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow", later included in Michele Field's anthology Shrinklit (1983) - and in The Australian at the age of eighteen. Her first short story was published in literary magazine Billy Blue in July, 1982.

In 1984, she moved to London, where she was employed as a music critic by NME and where, on the advice of an editor, she wrote under the pseudonyms Antonella Black and Ginger Meggs. Her review of Cliff Richard's concert inspired him to sue the music journal. She also wrote "A Man Called Horse", the ZigZag cover story of alternative rock star Nick Cave, in which she documented his heroin-induced stupor (in retaliation, he wrote a song about her and British journalist Mat Snow entitled "Scum". Gambotto-Burke wrote about the experience most recently in the September 2006 issue of Men's Style Australia magazine). The Cave interview, and the story behind it, are also included in her book Lunch of Blood, while Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds included a version of "Scum" on their 2005 box set, B-Sides And Rarities.

Gambotto-Burke won UK Cosmopolitan magazine's New Journalist of the Year Award in 1988. That same year, she became engaged to the UK GQ editor Michael VerMeulen. In 1989 she returned to Sydney, after the demise of her relationship with VerMeulen, who would later die from a cocaine overdose at the age of 38 in 1995. Before leaving London, she wrote for The Independent on Sunday, notably a cover story on cardiothoracic surgeons ("Affairs of the Heart", March 17, 1991).

In 1989, she returned to Sydney, where she resumed contributing to The Weekend Australian as a feature profile writer and senior literary critic, and began writing for The South China Morning Post, The Globe and Mail in Canada, Harper's Bazaar, Men's Style, and other international publications.

Her first novel, The Pure Weight of the Heart was published by Orion Publishing in 1998, and went to number six on the Sydney Morning Herald's bestseller list that year.

After her brother committed suicide in 2001, she relocated to Byron Bay, the renowned countercultural haven, where she began to practice Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga and wrote The Eclipse. In a November 2003 interview with Yoga Magazine UK, she said: "I wanted to explain depression as a valid emotional response rather than as a disease ... I am not ashamed of my brother, and I do not see death as tragic - deliberate ignorance and fear are tragedies, not death."

Gambotto-Burke's essay, "The Language of the Dead", originally an extract from The Eclipse appears in "Some Girls Do ... My Life As A Teenager", the charity anthology edited by Jacinta Tynan published by Allen & Unwin in April, 2007.

On June 19, 2004, The Sydney Morning Herald named her as a high-profile member of Mensa International.

Also in 2004, she returned to Sydney. She is now also a regular contributor to My Child magazine. Her column, Raising Bethesda, concerns life with her husband, Alexander Gambotto-Burke, of the banking family. He is a columnist for The Guardian in London, IT writer, and, since 2006, an editorial consultant for Broken Ankle Books (who published The Eclipse in 2004). Their daughter Bethesda was born in December 2005, and baptized in 2007 by Bishop John Shelby Spong.

Gambotto-Burke has also in recent years become a vocal opponent of cyber pornography, and pornography as a whole. Blog critics of Gambotto-Burke describe her as shrilly denouncing pornography, but her work on pornography has been published internationally, most recently in Men's Style, The Weekend Australian and The South China Morning Post.

Edward De Bono, who wrote the foreword to Gambotto-Burke's second anthology of interviews, An Instinct for the Kill, tells of her philosophical position:

"Antonella is not afraid of words, ideas, her own opinions or the opinions of others. Perception is personal so truth is also personal. This is much more like Protagoras than like Plato. For Protagoras, perception was the only truth - but it was changeable. For Plato, the fascist, truth was what you had reached when you thought it was the absolute."

Author Matthew Condon elaborated on Gambotto-Burke in The Age: "Her razor eye for the architecture of pretension and her ability to record untidied dialogue, especially the way it can betray the human mind and soul, have made her an object of fear and derision. To have been 'Gambottoed' is to have had a vein opened."[1]

Gambotto-Burke was commissioned to write the core love stories of artist David Bromley's upcoming series of films, I Could Be Me (narrated by Hugo Weaving), which premiered at the [Adelaide Festival] in 2008.

She is also a widely-published literary critic and essayist. Her article on the emotional pitfalls of IVF Precious Progeny of a Petri Dish, revolving around Nichola Bedos' IVF & Ever After: The Emotional Needs of Families appeared in The Australian on July 28, 2007, her controversial interview with rock star Marilyn Manson Whom do you hate was published in The Weekend Australian on September 29, 2007, and her critique of the late academic and author Donald Horne's memoir of dying, Love but no awe as mortality closes in, was published in The Weekend Australian on October 20, 2007. On December 8, 2007, her critique of Michael Gates Gill's bestseller, How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else was published in The Weekend Australian, as was her critique of Isabel Allende's new memoir, The Sum of Our Days, on April 5, 2008.

Gambotto-Burke's website indicates that she is currently working on her fifth book. She is now also writing for Vogue, The Mail on Sunday, and Arena (magazine).

On April 7, 2008, What is Mother Love?, the celebrity anthology of mothering anecdotes to which Gambotto-Burke contributed, was published by Penguin, and her work is included in two anthologies that will be published internationally in 2009.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Film

  • I Could Be Me, directed by artist David Bromley (2007)

[edit] Television

Gambotto-Burke has appeared on programs such as Beauty & The Beast (Channel Ten, Foxtel), The Midday Show (Channel 9), Meet the Press (SBS), and performed cameos on Paul Fenech's SBS sitcom Pizza.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.brokenanklebooks.com/AuthorsGambottoPR.htm Antonella Gambotto-Burke Press Release