The Sydney Writers’ Festival has revealed that Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah will headline its 2026 program, just weeks after the Adelaide Writers’ Week was cancelled following a mass boycott when the Palestinian-Australian academic was dumped from its line-up.
The Sydney event, Australia’s largest writers’ festival, has informed key backers and donors that it will not rescind its invitation to the controversial author, even after NSW Premier Chris Minns labelled her inclusion in the regional Newcastle Writers Festival a “real head-scratcher”.
“A festival like ours, which holds freedom of expression as a core value, is not going to be in the business of cancelling or censoring writers,” festival chief executive Brooke Webb said. “Readers can make up their own minds about what they would like to attend. We know that without writers, there is no festival.”
The Sydney Writers’ Festival issued the invitation in October last year to Abdel-Fattah for her adult fiction debut, Discipline. She will feature in two sessions in a program of around 200 events.
“Randa is a significant Sydney writer with a new book that speaks to the here and now,” festival artistic director Ann Mossop said. “Sydney is a highly diverse city, and we aim to reflect the many and varied communities of writers and readers in our program.”
As Australia’s biggest writers’ festival, disinviting the author risked a national boycott and reputational damage far greater than that which crippled Adelaide Writers’ Week in January.
That firestorm, ignited when the Adelaide board deemed Abdel-Fattah “too culturally sensitive” following the Bondi Beach tragedy, led to the resignation of director Louise Adler and a boycott by 180 writers, forcing the event’s total cancellation.
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”.
She said 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. Abdel-Fattah has since said she was not aware of the scale of the attack at the time.
Jennifer Mills, an organiser of the “Constellation” rebel event to replace Adelaide Writers’ Week, said the public appetite to hear from Abdel-Fattah was “astonishing”.
A conversation between Abdel-Fattah and Adler at the 1200-seat Adelaide Town Hall sold out in three days, and has a waiting list of as many as 600 people. At Newcastle, the academic’s solo session is also sold out, and a second event has been scheduled.
“If festival programming is challenged by politicians they need to be courageous in defending freedom of expression,” Mills said. “If we don’t stand up for free expression, we will end up with a bland program that politicians think is palatable, which is very dangerous for artists and for democracy.”
Minns last week said he thought Newcastle Writers’ Festival organisers “were crazy to invite that author when you think about how divisive it is”, citing the potential for organisational “notoriety” as a significant risk.
“Of course the premier is entitled to his view,” Mossop said. “In fact, we think a writers’ festival provides a rare and welcome opportunity for readers and writers to come together for nuanced conversations about complex and sometimes difficult topics. Our full program, which will be released on March 10, reflects the diverse and dynamic literature coming out of Sydney, Australia and the world.”
Asked if the festival had come under pressure from government, Webb said: “We are in conversation with all our major stakeholders, which includes government. We are an independent organisation and program accordingly.”
It was after perceived pressure from South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas (which he denies), that the board of Adelaide Writers Week withdrew the academic’s invitation deeming it too culturally sensitive to continue to program so soon after the Bondi Beach shooting, where 15 people were killed.
NSW Arts Minister John Graham was approached for comment.
Discipline is set in Sydney in 2021 during Ramadan and follows two Palestinians, one in media and one in academia, who confront questions of silence over the bombardment of Gaza.
University of Melbourne’s Dr Denis Muller, from the School of Culture and Communication, said any writers’ festival had an ethical duty to resist external political pressures.
“The test is always the harm principle,” he said. “If there’s a reasonable foreseeable likelihood of serious harm being done to someone else as a result of what you do, then that’s where the boundary of free speech lies.
“Short of that – and there is nothing that suggests anything that Randa is going to say is likely to cause serious harm to others – what are you going to do? Shut her down on suspicion?” He added: “Banning books turns them into bestsellers and writers into martyrs.”
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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
