It is safe to say Randa Abdel-Fattah was not NSW Premier Chris Minns’ preferred choice for this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival.
When the Newcastle Writers Festival earlier this year refused to buckle to pressure and withdraw its invitation to the Palestinian-Australian author and academic, Minns questioned her inclusion, suggesting organisers were inviting unnecessary controversy following the December mass shooting in Bondi.
The Sydney Writers’ Festival – Australia’s largest literary event – also stood by its invitation.
The friction did nothing to dent its box office appeal, the festival announcing on Saturday that it is on track to deliver the highest sales figures in its 29-year history.
Abdel-Fattah’s two Saturday sessions were sold out, as were 52 per cent of all paid talks. By Saturday morning – the festival’s peak day, and just 24 hours before wrapping up – the event had surpassed its total ticket sales revenue and attendance figures at the same point last year.
It has been a significant week for the author, whose novel Discipline was also named on the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist. The book’s themes of institutional censorship mirror real-world events: earlier this year, a writers’ boycott forced the complete cancellation of Adelaide Writers’ Week after its board removed Abdel-Fattah from the lineup.
“It hasn’t surprised me that so many events have sold out, but rather the speed at which they did,” said festival chief executive Brooke Webb. “It’s not just one topic or one genre; it’s events across the board, which shows people are engaged and have a strong appetite for thoughtful conversations, ideas and cultural discussion.
“The other surprise is how much younger the audience is becoming. We used to think of ‘young’ as under 45; now it is under 25. There is a huge demand for long-form journalism, proving it is very much alive and vibrant.”
Abdel-Fattah, Antoinette Lattouf and Michael Mohammed Ahmad were given a rousing welcome and a standing ovation at the close of their panel discussion titled Silenced, a “critical dialogue about the things we aren’t allowed to say, but do”.
The speakers took aim at government policies that they said sought to censor language and media organisations which failed to report the situation on the ground in Palestine. Abdel-Fattah said she started writing Discipline about the post-9/11 generation who grew up during the United States’ war on terror and had completed it out of “revenge” to expose an institutional silence and repression over Gaza.
But Lattouf said that the sold-out event of 1000 people sent a powerful message to those “who wish to influence our institutions or that of our own government policies” that “we’re not OK” with “authoritarian[s] and the erosion of civil liberties and punishing people who dare show empathy or concern for Palestinians at this moment and Lebanese at this moment, that you want international law upheld”.
“I think selling out [this session] is really, really powerful because it signals to the next writers’ festival, which will no doubt get pressure, that if anything it’s a moral thing in a commercial environment.”
Abdel-Fattah had faced intense scrutiny over past social media posts, including one stating that Zionists had “no claim to cultural safety” and that institutions catering to their “fragile feelings” were “abhorrent” – comments she maintains were taken out of context. She was also criticised for changing her Facebook profile picture to an illustration of a paraglider with a Palestinian flag the day after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, though she has since stated she was unaware of the scale of the atrocities at the time.
Ahead of the festival, the Jewish Board of Deputies wrote to sponsors and corporate backers, urging them to consider whether supporting Abdel-Fattah’s participation would “strengthen or erode social cohesion in Sydney”. However, festival artistic director Ann Mossop defended the decision, asserting that writers’ festivals have a fundamental duty to explore uncomfortable questions of truth.
International guests echoed the sentiment of defending free expression. British journalist Jon Sopel warned that Australians must guard liberal democracy against the encroachment of populist politicians.
Pointing to the January 6 insurrection in the US, Sopel noted that only the personal courage of a few individuals – rather than institutional checks and balances – stood in the way of a constitutional rebellion. He added that it was an “enormous mistake” to gear public policy entirely towards keeping “the old wrinklies” of his own generation happy at the expense of younger generations locked out of the housing market.
Other highly popular speakers across the weekend included Slow Horses spy novelist Mick Herron, New Yorker staff writer and investigative reporter Patrick Radden Keefe, and acclaimed Australian authors Trent Dalton and Melissa Lucashenko.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
