Antonella Gambotto-Burke is an Italian-Australian author, journalist and singer-songwriter based in England and known for her writing about sex, death and motherhood."Facing the onslaught of maternal intimacy" by Andie Fox, Daily Life, June 5, 2014
Gambotto-Burke is best known for her memoir The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide, and her memoir/maternal feminist polemics Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution and Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine. In 2004, The Sydney Morning Herald named her as a high-profile member of Mensa International.'Mensa's Australian connection', The Sydney Morning Herald, 19–20 June 2004
She is the vocalist and co-songwriter with the British band MAMA ft. Antonella. The band made the 2026 GRAMMY Awards longlist in categories: Best Rock Album for their debut album Apex Predators, and Best New Artist.Personal instagram
Early years Gambotto-Burke was born into a northern Italian Catholic family in North Sydney and lived in East Lindfield on Sydney's North Shore.The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide, by Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Broken Ankle Books, 2004
She is the first child and only daughter of the late businessman Giancarlo Gambotto, whose High Court win against WCP Ltd. changed Australian corporate law, scuppered the NRMA float,'Failed NMRA float sinks lawyers' by Kathryn Bice, Australian Financial Review, 14 May 1999 made the Australian front pages, is featured in Oxbridge law exams,'Gambotto v WCP 182 CLR 432', by Oxbridge Law team, updated 4 January 2024 and was the subject of a book edited by Ian Ramsay, Professor of Law.Gambotto v WCP Ltd: Its Implications for Corporate Regulation, edited by Ian M. Ramsay, Centre for Corporate Law and Securities Regulation, Faculty of Law, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1996.
Her younger brother Gianluca, a Macquarie Bank executive, suicided in 2001."I couldn't save my brother from suicide - the biggest killer of British men under 45", by Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Telegraph, March 31, 2022
"I was raised to believe that I could achieve anything", Gambotto-Burke said in a North Shore Times cover story.'Revolutionary in high heels', by Doug Conway, North Shore Times, 26 April 2018
Fiction and poetry Gambotto-Burke was first published under the pseudonym "Clavis Lumen"Introduction to An Instinct for the Kill by Antonella Gambotto-Burke, HarperCollins, 1997 in the Sydney Morning Herald at the age of sixteen: a satire of poet Les Murray's "An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow", which was later included in Michele Field's anthology Shrinklit: Australia's Classic Literature Cut Down to Size.'An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow', by Clavis Lumen aka Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Penguin Books, 1983
Her first short story was published in the first on-sale issue of the Australian literary magazine Billy Blue in July 1982.
Gambotto-Burke contributed to Peter Blazey'sThe Peter Blazey Fellowship, School of Historical Studies, The Australia Center, 2009 short story anthology Love Cries: Cruel Passions, Strange Desires (1995). In the Sydney Morning Herald, Gail Cork described her contribution as "outstanding""A Vile Book for Mean and Pitiful People" by Gail Cork, The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 January 1995 and in Who, Margaret Smith noted its "darkly sinister" overtones."Love Cries" review by Margaret Smith, Who, 27 February 1995 "The Astronomer", a short story presaging many of the themes in her first novel, was published in 1989."The Astronomer" by Antonella Gambotto, Billy Blue Magazine, Summer 1989. Eight years later, Gambotto-Burke's novel The Pure Weight of the Heart (also featuring an astronomer-protagonist) was published by Orion Publishing in London, and went to number six on the Sydney Morning Heralds best-seller list. It was also Tatler magazine's book of the month in the UK.
Gambotto-Burke was commissioned by artist David Bromley to write his series of short films, I Could Be Me, which were narrated by Hugo Weaving and premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 2008. In an essay, Gambotto-Burke noted that, "As scripts are founded on what Alan Alda calls the 'subsurface tectonics of emotion', the result can sometimes be a psychic slam dunk."'Words in Motion', by Antonella Gambotto, The Weekend Australian, 21–22 May 2005 Bromley, in a separate interview, described the film as "like a kaleidoscope of images and it is run by my poetry and short stories by Antonella. And it has a large animation component."
Journalism Gambotto-Burke was first published in The Australian at the age of eighteen.
After moving to England in 1984, Gambotto-Burke worked for the music press in London - notably, the NME and Zig Zag. She won UK Cosmopolitan magazine's New Journalist of the Year Award in 1988. She also worked for The Independent on Sunday, notably a cover story on cardiothoracic surgeons."Affairs of the Heart" by Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Independent on Sunday Review, 17 March 1991.
In 1989, Gambotto-Burke returned to Sydney, where she resumed working for The Australian as a senior feature profile writer and literary critic. She also began writing for The South China Morning Post, The Globe and Mail, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Vogue and other major global publications. Channel Nine Entertainment Director Richard Wilkins said in an interview 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."'In the blood', by Murray Waldren, The Australian Magazine, 26–27 March 1994.
Of her journalism, author Matthew Condon wrote, "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.""Another phrase of her life" by Matthew Condon, The Age, 22 August 1998.
Gambotto-Burke's interviewees include Martin Amis, Elle Macpherson, Gérard Depardieu, 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.'Antonella Gambotto at The Sydney Institute' Retrieved 28 March 2023.
Her best known comic interview – with Warwick Capper,"The Blond Leading the Blond" by Antonella Gambotto, Mode, 1994 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", Professor Matthew Ricketson wrote in 2005."Close Up: Review" by Matthew Ricketson, The Age, 18 June 2005.
“The Blonde leading the Blonde” (Gambotto-Burke's interview with the Cappers) was, as writer Richard Cooke reported, reprinted several times, "and its descriptive passages – one of which described Joanne's pubic hair as 'white as the froth on a pint of Castlemaine' – became legend."'Tasteful Sexuality', by Richard Cooke, The Monthly, October 2019
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."'Dining Out with Mr. Lunch', by Murray Waldren, University of Queensland Press, 1999
Controversy In London, Gambotto-Burke was employed as a music critic at the NME by editor Neil Spencer'Interview with legendary NME editors Neil Spencer and Mat Snow', Boogaloo Radio, 13 August 2019 and, on the advice of her live editor Mat Snow, wrote under pseudonyms Antonella Black and Ginger Meggs.Introduction, An Instinct for the Kill, by Antonella Gambotto, HarperCollins, 1997 Her review of Cliff Richard's concert, in which she referred to him as "Satan" and which made national newspaper gossip columns, provoked him to sue the music journal.'Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Music Press' by Paul Gorman, Thames & Hudson, 2022
Gambotto-Burke then wrote "A Man Called Horse", the first cover story about alternative rock star Nick Cave to document his since-widely-reported heroin addiction. "Shifting from bad to worse the interview collapses, along with Cave, into a series of broken thoughts and unfinished sentences," British author Adam Steiner has noted.'Darker with the Dawn: Nick Cave's Songs of Love and Death', by Adam Steiner, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.‘Bad Seed Rising,’ by Bill Black, Sounds, 25 May 25, 1985'Cave Man Boogie' by Mick Mercer, Letters, Sounds, 8 June 1985Reply to ‘Cave Man Boogie,’ Letters, Sounds, 8 June 1985
Cave, who had told Melody Maker journalists that he wanted to "kill" Gambotto-Burke,'Book Review : ‘Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine by Antonella Gambotto-Burke', by John Robb, Louder than War, 10 July 2022 then wrote a song about her and Mat Snow entitled "Scum""Bet you think this song is about you", by Dave Simpson, The Guardian, 13 December 2008"Scum: The Inside Dope" by Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Men's Style, Spring 2006.Nick Cave: Sinner, Saint – The True Confessions, edited by Mat Snow, Plexus Publishing, 2011.
Gambotto-Burke, in 2022, wrote at length about her experience of Cave in Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, describing him as a "narcissist" and a "liar", and elaborating on the impact of his actions on her life and daughter.
In February 2025, Gambotto-Burke revealed in an essay that the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin now owns the letters Martin Amis wrote her during their secret non-sexual five-year romance. They met, the letters show, when Gambotto-Burke was 19 and Amis was 35, and he proceeded to use her as the basis for various characters in his novels for the next 35 years. His second wife Isabel Fonseca also distorted Gambotto-Burke in her first novel, Attachment, using her as the basis for the fictional husband's obsession, a 19-year-old Italian-Australian."Martin Amis stole my life" by Antonella Gambotto-Burke, UnHerd, February 14, 2025
Interview anthologies Lunch of Blood (Random House, 1994), Gambotto-Burke's 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 Best Australian Profiles: Review', by Katherine Wilson, The Age, 23 October 2004
In The Best Australian Profiles, Professor Matthew Ricketson wrote the introduction to Gambotto-Burke's work: "[She] 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."The Best Australian Profiles, edited by Matthew Ricketson, Black Inc., 2004.
Bestselling The Wolf of Wall Street (book) author Jordan Belfort, whom Gambotto-Burke interviewed for "maybe six hours", wrote "Chaos Theory", the foreword to her anthology MOUTH. In it, he said that "She also has an edge to her - let's just say I wouldn't want to be on her bad side. She has her own moral compass.""Chaos Theory: An Introduction to Antonella Gambotto-Burke", by Jordan Belfort, from MOUTH, by Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Broken Ankle Digital, 2013
Recent journalism