Janine Burke

Janine Burke is an art historian, biographer, curator, photographer, and award-winning novelist. An Honorary Senior Fellow in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne, she has published landmark studies of Australian women artists as well as studies and biographies of members of the Heide modernist circle, including Joy Hester, Albert Tucker, and Sunday Reed. She has also worked on Sigmund Freud’s art collection and in 2014 curated ‘Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing’ for the Freud Museum London. Her most recent book is My Forests: Travels with trees (2021).

An interview with Janine Burke

May 1994, no. 160 • 01 May 1994

Janine Burke built her reputation as an art critic specialising in the work of women painters, but she has been steadily supplanting that reputation with another, that of fiction writer. Since Speaking was published in 1984, she has written Second Sight, which won the Victorian Premier’s Award, and Company of Images, a novel about the Melbourne art world. With her fourth novel, which she says h ... (read more)