Q: Where are you from? How - if at all - has your sense of place colored your writing?

AGB: I was born at the Mater Misericordiae in Sydney on Sunday - I think it was a Sunday - September 19, 1965. Not a dark and stormy night - spring, rather; subequatorial spring. Eldest child of three raised in a Northern Italian household. Managed to avoid learning English until I was six or so. Loved the Preying Mantis ... or is that Praying Mantis? Sat under lilac wisteria amongst the Bogong Moths and lay on the verandah most every night in sultry summer, staring at the stars and bats that flew in soft and swooping shapes over the Killara basin.

Q: When and why did you begin writing? When did you first consider yourself a writer?

AGB: I have no memory of not being a writer. Oh, I tell a lie - I remember seeing the toothy big plaster face of Luna Park from my father's arms and screaming into his neck. I was absolutely terrified. And I also remember staring at the full moon whilst sitting on the kitchen table as my mother spoke to me.

Q: Who or what has influenced your writing, and in what way? What books have most influenced your life?

AGB: Oh, man - here goes ... Lolita and King, Queen, Knave, Vladimir Nabokov; Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett; Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte; First Love, Ivan Turgenev; Landscape & Memory, Simon Schama (a god!); Death in Venice, Thomas Mann; Humboldt's Gift, More Die of Heartbreak, and Something to Remember Me By, Saul Bellow; Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth; The Prodigy, Hermann Hesse; Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence; The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Yukio Mishima; Thou Shalt Not Be Aware and The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller (beautiful); Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert; Against Nature, JK Huysmans; Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka; Valuing Emotions, Michael Stocker; Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander; In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings, Professor Catharine MacKinnon; The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (unexpurgated); The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand; To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee; Love is a Dog From Hell, Charles Bukowski; anything by Carl Sandburg; Selected Poems, Pablo Neruda; The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster (finest 20th century children's book); Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy; Tenderness Shore, Meredith Stricker; Naked, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, When You Are Engulfed in Flames by the divine David Sedaris ...

Q: What is the most romantic book you've ever read? The scariest? The funniest?

AGB: Romantic: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Scariest: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings, Catharine MacKinnon. Funniest (three): Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Naked, and Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris.

Q: What music, if any, most inspires you to write? What do you like to listen to while writing?

AGB: Often listen to music whilst writing. The Downward Spiral, Closer to God, The Fragile and With Teeth by the important, intense and emotionally authentic Nine Inch Nails; Music for Airports by Brian Eno; Boys for Pele, Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink, From The Choirgirl Hotel, the Sugar Dub of In the Springtime of His Voodoo, To Venus and Back by Tori Amos; Pornography by the Cure; The Kick Inside, Lionheart, Kate Bush; Call Me, Come Down, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia and Welcome to The Monkey House by the Dandy Warhols. Insanely sexy stuff. And Jah Wobble is heavenly - the most perfectly gifted man. City of Light, Bill Laswell: my favourite CD of all time. (Also searching for Hashisheen.) Some atmospheric koto, too.

Q: What are you reading now? What CD is currently in your stereo?

AGB: Nevermind, Nirvana.

Q: What are you working on?

AGB: Working on my first literary collaboration and fifth book, and also working on a literary essay.

Q: Anything else?

AGB: I fret about my fading tattoo. It was so beautiful when first inked, so intricate and compelling, but has now faded to a bruise-blue smudge.

Q: Use this space to write about whatever you wish.

AGB: I am now married to the writer Alexander, the man I most admire in all the world. Infinitely courageous, potent, intelligent, and deep-feeling, he is everything I ever dreamed - but did not believe - a man could be. (He is also a tender and devoted father.) I shall finish with an e.e.cummings poem that always makes me cry:

Thy fingers make early flowers of
all things.
thy hair mostly the hours love:
a smoothness which
sings, saying
(though love be a day)
do not fear, we will go amaying.

thy whitest feet crisply are straying
Always
thy moist eyes are at kisses playing,
whose strangeness much
says; singing
(though love be a day)
for which girl art thou flowers bringing?

To be thy lips is a sweet thing
and small.
Death, Thee i call rich beyond wishing
if this thou catch,
else missing.
(though love be a day
and life be nothing, it shall not stop kissing).