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January 24, 2026 — 5:30am
In the aftermath of the cancellation of Adelaide Writers’ Week, Australia’s festival directors find themselves in a precarious position. The cultural landscape was already fraught; for three years, planners have balanced the volatile geopolitics of the Middle East against local debates over identity and expression.
But in the wake of the Bondi massacre, the raw anger simmering since Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and following the Israeli government’s devastating retaliation in Gaza, has largely shifted the conversation from theoretical debate to urgent crisis management.
Jobs that were once highly coveted have morphed into demanding diplomatic postings. Add to that the introduction of new hate speech laws – still to be tested – and the environment becomes even more complex for festivals.
“I’ve never seen Australian arts so fractured and on tenterhooks,” one leading festival curator told this masthead. That sentiment followed a writers’ boycott after Palestinian-Australian writer and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah was disinvited under pressure from the South Australian government.
The event’s ultimate cancellation two weeks ago made global headlines and now casts a long shadow over the 2026 festival circuit.
The drama escalated as last week wore on: Writers’ Week director Louise Adler and most of the board’s members quit. South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas was accused of pressuring the board (which he denies). Abdel-Fattah threatened Malinauskas with legal action, accusing him of defaming her in comments he made criticising her. She and Adler were then 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).
Rosemary Sorensen, founder of the Bendigo Writers Festival – also cancelled in 2026 due to similar pressures – agrees. “It’s impossible to say Israel and Palestine is not our issue,” she says. “Writers’ festivals are where you hear people speak who know what they’re talking about, unmediated and sometimes unabridged. Surely, that’s worth fighting for.”
Adelaide’s turbulence may simplify the path for upcoming festivals in Newcastle, Sydney, and Melbourne – if only by serving as a cautionary tale. However, the sensitivity is so extreme that representatives from Melbourne and Sydney Writers’ Festivals declined to be interviewed for this story.
On one level, Adelaide’s implosion highlights to arts boards the reputational cost of cancelling guests and the potential hazards of political interference. On another, it foreshadows even greater scrutiny of festival programs and their very intention to promote intellectual discourse and difficult conversations. For some in the Jewish community who feel under attack, that’s a small price to pay for social harmony.
“Of course I stand for free expression,” says high-profile publisher Morry Schwartz, who believes Abdel-Fattah should never have been invited to Adelaide Writers’ Week. “But nothing is absolute, and expression becomes problematic when it causes real fear or harm.”
For others, a more subtle danger looms: a kind of pre-emptive self-censorship driven by political pressure and the chilling effect of reputational risk.
Abdel-Fattah 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”.
This week she has said that those comments had been taken out of context. 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 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. She has since apologised and said she was not aware of the scale of the attack at the time.
Adler says that for two years now, the Murdoch press and Israel supporters have waged a relentless campaign to silence artists, writers, and academics – including Abdel-Fattah – who are critical of Israel. A number of Jewish creatives, meanwhile, say they have been excluded from similar events since October 7, 2023.
Professor Clare Wright, who joined the author walkout at Adelaide and co-curated Bendigo, goes as far to say that such criticism of Abdel-Fattah served as a “warning to other festival directors that it would be in their best and vested interests not to invite Palestinian artists to participate in their programs”. “It is censorship by stealth,” she says.
Speaking on ABC Radio this week, Abdel-Fattah described the event’s cancellation as “a watershed moment” that “exposed the political pressure that’s being brought to bear on the arts community and the need for institutions and for boards to push back, to hold true to the values that they espouse”.
“If you don’t do that, then it is … your stakeholders, your readers, your writers who will push back against those decisions,” she says. “People don’t want this kind of censorship and institutions are paying attention to that.”
The rancour has meant all upcoming festivals in 2026 are risk-checking their programs. “Everyone is looking closely at their governance around curatorial independence,” notes Rosemarie Milsom, founding director of the Newcastle Writers Festival, the first literary festival scheduled post-Bondi and Adelaide.
Two years ago, Milsom came under extreme pressure to cancel two writers invited to her 2024 festival. Her board stared down threats of boycotts and protests from both sides of the Israel-Gaza conflict that could have toppled the festival. She credits extensive consultation and behind-the-scenes support from writers for the event’s success, though the presence of security remains a jarring reality.
“As a festival director, I’ve had a couple of surreal experiences. One was cancelling the festival in 2020 three weeks out because of COVID. Fast-forward to that festival in 2024, and I’m standing in front of a couple of police officers – really lovely, affable Newcastle police officers – and they said to me, ‘When we send in two plain-clothed [officers] to the event on Saturday, what should they wear?’ and I just stood there and thought, ‘I just can’t believe I’m having this conversation.’”
Milsom, one of the longest-serving writers’ festival directors in Australia, sends her program – finalised in December before Adelaide’s implosion – to the printers on Tuesday. “We’ve not intentionally altered the program in response to Adelaide,” she says.
“In any event, one person’s definition of controversy is not necessarily another’s. I think any program is going to have an element of controversy purely because you’ve got a program and people aren’t going to like the people you are programming for whatever reason.”
Adelaide’s experience suggests that once a writer is invited, a festival must stand by them or risk total collapse. Former Sydney Writers’ Festival chair Kathy Shand believes independence is vital, but notes that “freedom of expression should not justify language that compromises a festival as a safe and inclusive space”.
Literary festivals occupy a singular cultural niche, making the fight for their stages vital, says Shand, who quit SWF last year over disagreements with programming. It was incumbent on curators to enrich debate with diverse perspectives, and not increasingly platform partisan voices and “inflammatory rhetoric”, she says.
As the 2026 season begins, literary festival directors say their audiences and writers are demanding they make “braver spaces”, not just “safer” ones. Sydney Writers’ Festival 2025 achieved record-breaking attendance, with more than 101,000 attendees under the unifying theme of In this Together. As one festival administrator states: “We need to get more comfortable with uncomfortable conversations. That is the litmus test of a healthy and sophisticated a civilised democracy.”
Booker Prize-winning Australian author Richard Flanagan says it was writers – the people who have the least and lost the most – who held a critical line on free speech. “It was writers at their own cost who reminded politicians just what was at stake and why it mattered and, in so doing, reminded the nation why we need free, unfettered voices more than ever.”
Louise Adler, now the former director of Adelaide Writers’ Week after resigning this month, warns of managing long-term damage done to Australia’s festival reputation.
“Persuading a writer to make the long trek to Australia is an act of courtship,” Adler says. “There has to be a shared sense that bringing writers and readers together for conversations is important. There is a wide range of financial consequences when a festival is cancelled: the breach of faith with attendees, relationships with partners and suppliers are jeopardised, and, in our case, international coverage of the debacle.”
She wonders if international writers, their agents and publishers will feel confident coming to Australia. “What is clear now is that writers, who are normally to be found in their garrets, have learnt how to get organised. Within 24 hours of the announcement that one Palestinian writer was to be disinvited, over 100 writers declared their opposition to censorship,” Adler says.
Under new hate speech laws, festival planners must now navigate the murky distinction between personal safety – freedom from harassment – and intellectual safety – freedom from provocation. One director notes that while cultural safety applies to all, audience members must exercise personal responsibility: “When you buy a ticket, you assume responsibility for that purchase.”
To mitigate risk, festivals might lean on strictly balanced panels and vetted audience questions.
However, curators worry “safe” disagreements merely create an illusion of debate, stripping away the friction essential to a vital festival.
Kathy Shand argues that “brave” and “safe” are not mutually exclusive. She views panels as a form of long-form journalism that offer deeper analysis than the nightly news. No one community is homogenous. “It’s incumbent on festivals to find those other voices that bring light into the space,” she says. Rosemary Sorenson adds that while directors must keep balance in mind, they “shouldn’t be swayed by the loudest, nastiest voices of complaint”.
Schwartz sees it differently. “I read a commentator today with the view that instead of cancelling Abdel-Fattah they might have invited her to debate Michael Gawenda [a former Age editor who been a vocal critic of Adler] instead. Bad idea. It goes to the very heart of the matter – it confirms the obvious – that she was there with a very specific agenda.”
For Adler, it’s not a question of risk or balance. “I’m not running a debating society, I’m not running a festival of politics, I’m running a literary festival. My view is to have credible writers with expertise on their areas of interest.
“It’s about ensuring invitees are aware of and will adhere to Australian laws around hate speech and incitement to violence … and the standard moral, ethical conventions and legal conventions around how one conducts oneself in a civil discussion.”
Adding pressure is the publishing industry’s symbiotic relationship with festivals. With 90 per cent of guests appearing to promote new releases, there is a growing fear that publishers may favour authors who avoid community tensions, further narrowing the scope of public discourse.
Shand hopes this year’s programming across Australia will pivot when reflecting international developments globally and in particular Gaza. “Last year was an active war; so, the hope is that festivals will reflect that the war is over,” she says, suggesting a shift toward speakers who can address questions of reconstruction and reconciliation.
Beyond Gaza, she sees audiences seeking insights into a changing Middle East, the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and the ongoing protest movements in Iran.
Adelaide also proved that festivals are financially vulnerable once a state government or major sponsor threatens to pull funding. Anecdotally, directors report that funding entities are re-emphasising “social cohesion” and that state and federal arts agencies are paying closer attention to their content though at least one festival says that their sponsors are observing an arm’s-length distance despite the controversy.
NSW Arts minister John Graham accepts that, in recent years, Jewish arts and culture lovers have not always felt welcome at cultural events.
“I expect cultural institutions and organisations to be taking positive steps to make the Jewish community feel welcome again. I am meeting with Jewish leaders to develop concrete ways to achieve that. Social cohesion doesn’t come at the expense of rigour, creativity or bold programming.”
One response has been to impose stricter codes of conduct. After a donor boycott triggered by a pro-Palestinian protest during a performance of The Seagull in 2023, the Sydney Theatre Company and others tightened rules prohibiting conduct that could damage a company’s reputation. Similarly, in July last year, a letter from Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A) led La Trobe University to introduce a code of conduct for its component of the Bendigo Writers’ Festival. It prompted a walkout by authors.
Neither Sydney Writers’ Festival nor Melbourne thus far have insisted on participating authors signing a code of conduct. “Our code of conduct is the law around hate speech, bigotry and racism,” says one administrator, who declined to be named.
The extent of protection for an artist’s political expression is now a test case for Australian workplace law. Pianist Jayson Gillham launched legal action against the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra after it cancelled a performance over his comments regarding journalists’ deaths in Gaza.
Ultimately, Milsom believes literary festivals are now more necessary than ever. “It’s surreal that a writers’ festival – a space for people to come together and listen to respectful conversation – is seen as radical now. But that reflects the divisiveness of the world. Writers’ festivals are the antidote to all the yelling that happens on social media.”
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