the back-bending philosopher

Antonella Gambotto-Burke (born September 19, 1965 in Sydney, Australia, nee Antonella Gambotto) is an author and journalist. She 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. 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 Best Australian Profiles. "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.

Gambotto-Burke was commissioned to write the interlinking love stories in artist David Bromley's upcoming film, I Could Be Me (narrated by Hugo Weaving), and her essay, The Language of the Dead, will appear in Some Girls Do ... My Life As A Teenager, the charity anthology published by Allen & Unwin in 2007.

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 Michelle Field's anthology - 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. Her review of Cliff Richard's concert inspired him to sue the NME. She also wrote 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 entitled Scum). This interview, and the story behind it, was later included in her anthology, Lunch of Blood.

She 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, who died from a cocaine overdose at the age of 38 in 1995.

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, Harper's Bazaar, Men's Style, and other international publications. On June 19, 2004, the Sydney Morning Herald named her as a high-profile member of Mensa International.

After her brother committed suicide in 2001, she relocated to Byron Bay, a renowned countercultural haven, where she began practising Astanga yoga and wrote The Eclipse. In a November 2003 interview with Yoga Magazine, 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 returned to Sydney in 2004. She is now also a regular contributor to My Child magazine. Her column concerns life with her husband, Alexander Gambotto-Burke, a columnist for The Guardian in London and IT writer, and their daughter, born December 2005.