the back-bending philosopher

Antonella Gambotto-Burke (née Antonella Gambotto, born 19 September 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: A Memoir of Suicide, which has been published in three languages and is due to be published in two more in 2008. The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide 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 18 June 2005. She is also a member of Mensa.

biography

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", 17 March 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 Australia, and other international publications.

Lunch of Blood, her first book and first anthology, was published by Random House in 1994, and peaked at number six on the bestseller lists. The Newcastle Herald observed that Gambotto-Burke's "command of language is delicious to the point where one wonders which came first, her wish to display her ability or the desire to share her impressions." Author Colleen McCullough commented that Gambotto-Burke's "integrity, adamantine wit, and ability to cut through the most elaborate psychological defence systems establish her as one of the finest writers this country has ever produced." In 1997, An Instinct for the Kill, her second anthology, was published to mixed reviews by HarperCollins.

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 and was Tatler's book of the month.

After her brother committed suicide in 2001, Gambotto-Burke relocated to Byron Bay, the renowned countercultural haven, where she began to practice Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga and wrote The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide. 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: A Memoir of Suicide appears in "Some Girls Do ... My Life As A Teenager", the charity anthology edited by Jacinta Tynan published by Allen & Unwin in April, 2007.

In a 2008 interview with Arena (magazine), Gambotto-Burke remarked that "[o]ur idea of what it is to be human is a fragile construct, and, in essence, more a cultural/political prescription than representative of true human experience. Men are made to understand that (a) emotion is feminine terrain, (b) that the experience of emotion lessens or erodes masculinity, and (c) that reason is superior to emotion. But emotion is not gendered. We all love, fear, celebrate, grieve. There is absolutely no relationship to gender, other than the one that exists in our cultural mythology. How can reason separated from emotion? The very importance with which we imbue reason is a value judgment ... This fantasy of objectivity distorts all our lives. To be human is, by definition, to be subjective. You can only perceive the world through the prisms of your age, gender, physical limitations, culture, and so on."

On 19 June 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 and IT/science writer. She wrote about his marriage proposal in the July 2008 issue of Vogue. Their daughter Bethesda was born in December 2005, and baptized 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."

Gambotto-Burke was commissioned to write the core love stories of artist David Bromley's series of films, I Could Be Me (narrated by Hugo Weaving), which premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 2008. "It's like a kaleidoscope of images and it's run by my poetry and short stories by Antonella," Bromley told The Age. "And it has a large animation component."

She is also a widely-published literary critic and essayist. In August, 2006, Gambotto-Burke told Vogue that, "Language shapes consciousness and from consciousness, our world is shaped."

Gambotto-Burke's website indicates that she is currently working on her fifth book. She is now also writing for The Mail on Sunday, and Arena (magazine). Her interview with Toby Young, the controversial British author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, was published in the December 2008 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, and her essay on American playwright David Mamet was published in Men's Style, released the same month.

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.