Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Australian author and journalist (b.1965)

Gambotto Burke is best known for her memoir The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide, her memoir/maternal feminist polemics Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution and Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine.

Gambotto Burke was born in North Sydney and moved to East Lindfield on Sydney's North Shore at the age of four, the first child and only daughter of the late Giancarlo Gambotto, whose High Court win against WCP Ltd. changed Australian corporate law, made the front pages of the Australian Financial Review and The Australian, is still featured in corporate law exams, and was the subject of a book edited by Ian Ramsay, Professor of Law at Melbourne University. "I was raised to believe that I could achieve anything", she said in a North Shore Times cover story.

Gambotto Burke was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald at the age of sixteen – a satire of poet Les Murray's "An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow", later included in Michele Field's anthology Shrinklit (1983). She was first published in The Australian at the age of eighteen. Her first short story was published in literary magazine Billy Blue Magazine in July 1982. The Sydney Morning Herald named her as a member of Mensa International.

In 1984, at the age of 19, 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", an unflattering 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"; a photograph of Gambotto Burke and Snow was published with Snow's account of the story in The Guardian). Gambotto Burke wrote about the experience in September 2006, and the interview has been reprinted for the third time in Nick Cave: Sinner, Saint. 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's best known comic interview – with Warwick Capper, a retired Australian rules footballer, and his wife – is included in The Best Australian Profiles (Black Inc., 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", Matthew Ricketson wrote in 2005. Her interviewees included Martin Amis, Elle Macpherson, Gérard Depardieu, Ben Elton, Morrissey, Thierry Mugler, Marc Newson, Deepak Chopra, Flavio Briatore, Robert Smith, Erica Jong, Colleen McCullough, Jeffrey Archer, Princess Haya bint Al Hussein, Jerry Hall and Naomi Wolf. 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 died from a cocaine overdose at the age of 38 in 1995. Before leaving London, Gambotto Burke wrote for The Independent on Sunday, notably a cover story on cardiothoracic surgeons. In 1989, she returned to Sydney, where she resumed contributing to The Weekend Australian as a feature profile writer and literary critic, and also began writing for The South China Morning Post, The Globe and Mail in Canada, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Vogue and other international publications. Channel Nine Entertainment Director Richard Wilkins noted that "if you're on her wavelength, the interview is a most enjoyable experience. If not, it could be quite disconcerting. The key is to be open and honest with her." After divorcing, she returned to England with her daughter in 2017 and began working for The Sunday Times and other newspapers. In October 2020, she was revealed as the inspiration for British novelist Martin Amis's most iconic female characters, notably Nicola Six from London Fields (novel) and Zoya from House of Meetings. Amis did not deny their five year relationship, nor did he publicly explain the many parallels she pointed out in her story to his characters and that of the character "Giovana" in his wife Isabel Fonseca's novel, Attachment, to her own life.

Lunch of Blood (Random House, 1994), her first book and first anthology, peaked at number six on the best seller 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." In 1997, An Instinct for the Kill, her second anthology, was published to mixed reviews by HarperCollins. (The Age critic Katherine Wilson singled out the Capper interview as "laugh out loud" funny.) The introduction to Gambotto Burke's work in The Best Australian Profiles reads: "Gambotto is probably the closest Australia has come to having a profile writer who is a celebrity in their own right and from the early 1990s readers became as interested in Gambotto Burke as they were in the people she profiled." In Undercover Agent, Murray Waldren noted that "an interview with [Gambotto Burke] often has the studied savagery of the corrida amid the crystal cruet ambience of high tea at the Ritz. Such ritualistic disembowelling, highly entertaining and in stark contrast to the asinine, PR driven pap of most modern profiles, leave the gored stirred and very shaken."