“Language shapes consciousness and from consciousness, our world is shaped.”
– Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Vogue
Antonella Gambotto-Burke is a critic {LINK TO REVIEWS], writer [LINK TO BOOKS] and singer/songwriter [LINK TO MUSIC]. She is the author of The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide [LINK] and Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution [LINK], among others. Her new book, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, can be preordered on Amazon UK [ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Drugs-Motherhood-Recovery-Feminine/dp/178066740X ] and, for other territories, through bookdepository.com.
She has contributed to a raft of international newspapers and magazines, including The Sunday Times (UK), Vogue, Elle, The Australian, The Telegraph (UK), The Mail on Sunday(UK) and The South China Morning Post. Her work, both fiction and non-fiction, is published in anthologies. The Mirror (UK) recently included her in a select group of the world’s most inspiring feminists.
Gambotto-Burke, who is based in Kent, England, with her beloved 14-year-old daughter Bethesda, was described by Tatler as a novelist of “great sensitivity” and as having “a keen eye for satire, which she uses to great effect.” In The Sunday Age Matthew Condon wrote that reading her fiction is “like being unable to stop staring into the sun when you’ve been told that it damages your eyes,” and Who magazine described her as possessing “a major literary talent.”
Her literary nonfiction has also been widely praised. Professor Nicholas Humphrey, author of A History of the Mind, wrote that The Eclipse: A Memoir of
Suicide is “an astonishing, deep and beautiful book”, Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention called it “a brilliant, moving book,” and Michael Rakusin of Tower Books described it a “masterpiece”.
Gambotto-Burke is known for longform journalistic nonfiction, and her work was featured in The Best Australian Profiles. Her selection of interviewees is eclectic. She has interviewed cardiothoracic surgeons and film stars, authors and rock luminaries, artists and academics, fashion designers and royalty. Her subjects include Princess Haya bint Al Hussein, Bette Midler, Marilyn Manson, Sasha Grey, Nick Cave, Morrissey, Robert Smith of the Cure, John Shelby Spong, Paul Ekman, Jackie Collins, Martin Amis, Neil Gaiman, Chuck Palahniuk and others.
Australian Bookseller and Publisher described her as having “the astonishing ability to reveal the absolute essence of a person,” and The Weekend Australian Magazine said that she seems “to mesmerize … her subjects”. Edward de Bono wrote of Gambotto-Burke’s work, “The pieces stand in the great tradition of writing that is to be read for its own sake as with the classic essayists.”
Her recent journalism is notable for its humanitarian emphasis.
In 2015, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution, Gambotto-Burke’s first book on her experience of marriage, divorce, motherhood and our cultural capacity for attachment, was published. KJS Anand, Professor of Paediatrics, Neurobiology and Anesthesiology at Stanford and a Nils Rosen von Rosenstein laureate (the equivalent of the Nobel for Paediatrics), described Mama as “undeniably the most important book of the twenty-first century.” Excerpts from Mama were published in major newspapers and magazines around the world. The online version of The Guardian UK’s excerpt went viral .
In 2017, Gambotto-Burke was asked to be the first ambassador for Procreate Project, a London-based social enterprise created to encourage and support the work of artists who are mothers. She was a keynote speaker at the London AGM of Mothers at Home Matter, a British organisation of maternal feminists. Over the following two years and in addition to working on a novel, contributing to newspapers and homeschooling, she appeared at literary festivals, Canterbury Christ Church University, and was featured on the cover of The North Shore Times.
In 2019, she hosted The Antonella Showon Boogaloo Radio, interviewing artists such as Jah Wobble, Alan McGee and Magnus Fiennes [LINK TO RADIO PAGE]. She left to work on her upcoming book, Apple: Sex, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine [LINK TO SECTION].
Gambotto-Burke is also making her first album with her band AF [LINK TO AF SECTION].