Adelaide Writers’ Week cancelled after director quits

This year’s Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week has been cancelled after 180 writers boycotted the event and its director quit following a decision by the festival board to remove Palestinian-Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from the line-up.

The event’s director, Louise Adler, resigned on Tuesday morning, saying she “cannot be party to silencing writers” after the festival board removed Abdel-Fattah from the program last week.

Writing for The Guardian, Adler said she did so “with a heavy heart”.

In a statement announcing the cancellation of Writers’ Week, which had been due to start on February 28, the festival apologised to Abdel-Fattah for “how the decision was represented”.

It went on to say: “[We] reiterate this is not about identity or dissent but rather a continuing rapid shift in the national discourse around the breadth of freedom of expression in our nation following Australia’s worst terror attack in history.”

“As a board, we took this action out of respect for a community experiencing the pain from a devastating event. Instead, this decision has created more division and for that we express our sincere apologies.”

In an Instagram post, Abdel-Fattah said she refused and rejected the board’s apology, describing it as disingenuous, and saying it “adds insult to injury”.

“It is clear the board’s regret extends to how the message of my cancellation was conveyed, not the decision itself,” Abdel-Fattah wrote.

New board appointments were announced on Tuesday afternoon by the South Australian Arts minister, Andrea Michaels.

Judy Potter, immediate past chair of the Adelaide Festival, has been appointed chair, with previous AF executive director Rob Brookman, media identity Jane Doyle and accountant John Irving.

The new board will meet on Wednesday. Just one member of the board involved with the decision to remove Abdel-Fattah remains, Cr Mary Couros, who represents Adelaide City Council.

“Reputationally it is an issue for us but we are the festival state and we will bounce back from this,” Michaels said.

On Sunday, Abdel-Fattah sent a letter, via her lawyers, to the festival asking why she was disinvited.

Adler argued vehemently against the board’s decision, which was revealed last Thursday. Since then, four members of the board have resigned, including the chair, and writers have pulled out en masse. Adler says her count is 180.

“In the aftermath of the Bondi atrocity, state and federal governments have rushed to mollify the ‘we told you so’ posse. With alarming insouciance, protests are being outlawed, free speech is being constrained and politicians are rushing through processes to ban phrases and slogans,” she writes.

“Now religious leaders are to be policed, universities monitored, the public broadcaster scrutinised and the arts starved.

“Writers and writing matters, even when they are presenting ideas that discomfort and challenge us. We need writers now more than ever, as our media closes up, as our politicians grow daily more cowed by real power, as Australia grows more unjust and unequal.”

Sydney-based Abdel-Fattah had been scheduled to speak about her new novel, Discipline, which examines ideas of truth and censorship. In recent years, she has come under fire for past social media posts that said Zionists had “no claim to cultural safety” and that institutions that considered “fragile feelings of Zionists” were “abhorrent”.

She was also criticised for posting an illustration of a paraglider with a Palestinian flag parachute as her Facebook profile photo the day after the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. She has since apologised. “At that point, I had no idea about the death toll, about what was happening on the ground,” Abdel-Fattah told ABC News on Monday. “Of course I do not support the killing of civilians.”

Asked about the social media posts, Adler told the ABC on Tuesday night that she believed they had been deleted and were not relevant to the author’s spot on the program.

“She’s not been asked to come to Writers’ Week because of her social media feed. She’s been asked to come to talk about a novel she’s written called Discipline, a novel that’s topical, of this moment, and I thought was worthy of a conversation,” she said.

Responding to Adler’s announcement on Instagram, Abdel-Fattah wrote, “I stand with her.”

She continued: “Zionists went after a Palestinian woman and an anti-Zionist Jewish woman. That’s their business model ... Judaism and Jewish identity is not Zionism, a political ideology. Solidarity with the brilliant Louise Adler, who has had her Jewish identity attacked and erased.”

Last Thursday, the Adelaide Festival board announced that while it was not suggesting “in any way” that Abdel-Fattah or her writing had any connection with the Bondi attack, given her past statements, “it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi”.

Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern cancelled her appearance at the festival on Monday, following high-profile writers Trent Dalton, Helen Garner, Zadie Smith and Masha Gessen.

Adler did not respond to requests for comment.

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