Louise Adler and Randa Abdel-Fattah headline rebel Adelaide literary festival

A rebel literary festival created in direct response to the cancellation of Adelaide Writers’ Week will feature the two women at the centre of the major event’s implosion.

At the one-off new event, cheekily titled Constellations: Not Writers’ Week, Palestinian-Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah – whose removal from AWW sparked the events that last month led to its cancellation – will speak with former Writers’ Week director Louise Adler, who resigned after writers boycotted the event en masse.

Several authors from the original AWW line-up are on the bill, including former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, writer and academic Professor Clare Wright, former Australian Greens leader Bob Brown and Miles Franklin Award winner Melissa Lucashenko. (Varoufakis is speaking with Abdel-Fattah in Sydney and with Adler in Melbourne at separate Australian Institute events in March.)

Nobel Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee will also read his work in a poetry event as part of Constellations, which will be held in various locations across Adelaide from February 28 to March 5 – when AWW was meant to be staged.

In January, the Adelaide Festival board made a statement uninviting Abdel-Fattah from Adelaide Writers’ Week, a move which set off a boycott of the event by 180 writers, led Adler to resign, and to the 2026 event being cancelled.

All bar one member of the Adelaide Festival board – which oversaw Adelaide Writers’ Week – then resigned and a new board was appointed, quickly apologising to Abdel-Fattah and inviting her to AWW next year.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas was accused of pressuring the board (which he denied) after he said he did not agree with Abdel-Fattah’s inclusion in the program. Abdel-Fattah later threatened Malinauskas with legal action, accusing him of defaming her in comments he made criticising her.

She and Adler were accused of hypocrisy after it emerged that they had both lobbied for Jewish writer Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, to be removed from the 2024 line-up after he had written a widely criticised piece comparing the situation in the Middle East to the animal kingdom. (Friedman told this masthead that he did not withdraw, but that he had been uninvited by organisers, who told him the timing would not work).

Britpop legends Pulp, who will headline the opening of Adelaide Festival on February 27, last month said they had thought about boycotting but would not do so, given the festival board’s apology and backflip.

The one-off Constellations festival will be held at Adelaide Town Hall and other venues, with the majority of events free or by donation. The program is expected to expand.

In January, Adelaide City Council voted to provide venues for the event but not financial support. The council traditionally provides some funding to Adelaide Writers’ Week.

Constellations is organised by local representatives including booksellers, publishers and authors, and not-for-profit industry body Writers South Australia.

Author Jennifer Mills, chair of the Australian Society of Authors, which is also involved in the event, told this masthead: “Constellations has come together in direct response to the cancellation of Writers’ Week 2026. We’re very happy that audiences will get to hear from Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah directly.”

Mills said she was proud of how much support there had been for the new, one-off event, and was very concerned about attacks on freedom of expression, particularly in the arts and culture sector.

Such attacks tended to fall disproportionately on people of colour, she said, citing the pro-Palestinian writers cancelled from teen writing workshops by State Library Victoria; Khaled Sabsabi, who was uninvited to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale by Creative Australia and then reinstated; and Antoinette Lattouf, who was sacked by the ABC.

“I think it’s very important for artists to speak up in defence of freedom of expression, as we have here,” Mills said.

“So we are looking at prioritising Palestinian voices, First Nations voices, and celebrating some of the writers who pulled out of the AWW program. It’s very important to us that we didn’t just leave a void of silence in the city that week.”

Mills issued a challenge to the South Australian premier to come along and listen. She hopes Malinauskas “picks up a copy of [Abdel-Fattah’s] book and picks up a lot of books from writers that are appearing at the festival”.

She said the event would be different from ordinary writers’ festivals, with a decentralised organisational structure, and because it had been created in direct response to another event being cancelled.

The name for the one-off event came from Natalie Harkin, a Narungga poet, inspired by the constellation as a First Nations way of working. “It was just such a beautiful image, not just for the decentralised nodal structure that we’re using, but also, reaching for the skies and thinking about the future,” says Mills.

The festival opens on February 28 with a day pitched at young readers. “Children need to see their own worlds and lives reflected in the stories and books they read,” said author and organiser Bethany Clark.

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