I’m going to try to explain what’s happening with the Adelaide Writers Week festival right now, because I think writers everywhere should know about it.

There’s a prominent Palestinian author/intellectual here called Randa Abdel-Fattah. For clarity: I did not closely follow her work previously to this. I was vaguely aware of a controversy surrounding one of her research grants. Perhaps I need to better track Australia’s discourse more generally.

A few days ago, an important Adelaide event called Adelaide Writers Week (which is part of the prestigious Adelaide Festival) announced, out of the blue, that they were disinviting Abdel-Fattah from their week-long event series in March.

This is an event I usually attend. It’s significant, in a national sense. The current director (for only a few years) is Louise Adler, who has had an incredible career including studying under Edward Said. (Adler, it’s worth noting is Jewish.)

The reason that Writers Week gave, in their publicly available online statement (on Jan 8th), for disinviting Abdel-Fattah (linked here), alluded to what happened in Bondi on the first night of Hannukah. In language I find shocking, in that it is appearing on a cultural institution’s website, Writers Week claimed that, “it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi.”

There has been an uproar, with an extensive list of writers pulling out of the Writers Week event, and all sorts of publishing organizations registering their denouncement of the decision.

It has also come out, rather clearly in non-paywalled national news, that South Australia’s premier (highest elected official) was happy to share with the media that he supported the Writers Week decision to remove this Palestinian novelist, who was slated to talk about her latest book.

I was camping when the decision came out, but as soon as I had reception I posted on Threads that I denounce the Writers Week decision. I am saying this as a Jewish writer based in Adelaide. Of course, I am receiving a barrage of verbal assault.

There is so much more to be said. I would love for people to go out and find articles on this, and start reading the various social media posts from the writers who are pulling out of the event. I felt shame to be a writer when Writers Week announced all of this, but I have felt proud to be a writer, seeing names like Zadie Smith, Hannah Kent, and Yanis Varoufakis and many, many others who so audibly have distanced themselves from the event and its organization.

What was Writers Week thinking? I do not think any writers are actually on their board. This decision was made by people who care about politics, not literature. Who want to instigate more tension, not generate dialogue. This is a sinister move and I am glad to be seeing it fought earnestly with public defiance. I am so glad that Writers SA, the association I have belonged to (and taught classes with) has shown that they are truly for writers, by immediately backing out of Writers Week.

There have been statements pointing out that Abdel-Fattah was part of a co-signed effort to remove Thomas Friedman (the American writer, author of From Beirut to Jerusalem). I am not going to engage in a discussion of whether this is morally “OK” or not, as people online are asking me to do, but I will point out that this is apples and oranges. Banding with other writers to express opposition to one writer’s ideology (especially at a time when that ideology is core to a genocide) is not the same as a powerful board of non-writers suddenly axing a person’s involvement.

I’m appalled that people are still not understanding, that it is possible to hold multiple truths at once. That a person can grieve, every day, what happened October 7th. That we can grow up with a lifetime of experiencing anti-semitism. And that we can still see the everyday violence that holds up a military occupation that exists in the name of a religion. A religion that has been pulled to extremism.

That we can see all these things, live them and question how to exist within them, and mourn what happened at Bondi on Hannukah, and yet know that we cannot respond with more hatred, more exclusion, more shriveling from dialogue. Writers know this.

Read the Jan 8th Writers Week statement here: