WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Organizers of Australia’s largest free literary festival canceled the event Tuesday after more than 180 writers and speakers withdrew over the scrapping of an appearance by an Australian-Palestinian writer and academic.
The uproar began when the board of the Adelaide Festival, which runs Adelaide Writers Week, announced on Jan. 8 that they had disinvited Randa Abdel-Fattah from the event “given her previous statements” and citing cultural sensitivities “at this unprecedented time so soon after” an antisemitic mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach.
There was no suggestion that Abdel-Fattah or her writings “have any connection with the tragedy,” the board members added.
The board didn’t cite specific statements by the lawyer, academic and writer of fiction and nonfiction, and Abdel-Fattah decried the move as “censorship” and said the announcement suggested that her “mere presence” was culturally insensitive.
The episode unfolded amid a fraught national debate in Australia about limits on speech following a massacre at a Dec. 14 Hannukah event at which 15 people were shot dead by two gunmen apparently inspired by Islamic State ideology.
Adelaide Writers Week was scheduled to run for six days beginning in late February, as part of an annual culture festival. Some 160,000 people attended the literary event’s 40th iteration in 2025.
It’s not clear why Abdel-Fattah was disinvited
Born in Australia to Palestinian and Egyptian parents, Abdel-Fattah often writes about Islamophobia and had been invited to speak about her novel Discipline, which follows two Muslims, a journalist and a university student, navigating issues of censorship in Sydney. She ha …