From Invitation to Cancellation: Lessons from the Adelaide Writers’ Week Debacle

 

From Invitation to Cancellation: Lessons from the Adelaide Writers’ Week Debacle

by

Russell Blackford

 

On 8 January 2026, the Adelaide Festival Board announced the cancellation of Randa Abdel-Fattah’s scheduled appearance at Adelaide Writers’ Week – a literary festival that forms part of the broader Adelaide Festival scheduled to begin in late February. This prompted a confusing sequence of events with new developments announced on a daily basis and an accompanying flood of articles offering revelations or perspectives.

 

Abdel-Fattah identifies as Palestinian and takes a stance of radical opposition to the state of Israel and to people whom she considers Zionists. When the festival board announced its decision to deplatform her, it stated: “[G]iven her past statements we have formed the view that it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi.” The reference to Bondi was, of course, to the Bondi Beach terrorist attack on 14 December 2025, when a father-and-son team of jihadists opened fire on a Jewish community event and killed 15 of their targets as well as wounding many others. The board also noted that it was not suggesting that Abdel-Fattah “or her writing” had “any connection” with the Bondi Beach massacre.

 

Although concepts such as cultural sensitivity are vague, board members evidently thought that Abdel-Fattah’s presence at Writers’ Week would be distressing to some attendees at the festival. Viewed charitably, the board made an understandable decision – though not (as I’ll argue) the correct or best one. It responded to the fear and anguish experienced by many people in the Jewish community in Australia, especially after what had happened at Bondi Beach.

 

In reaction, a large number of the scheduled writers, including many prominent national and international figures such as Helen Garner and Zadie Smith, withdrew in protest. The online list of participants soon disappeared and accusations of censorship and racism proliferated.

 

The director of Writers’ Week ended up resigning, as did the entire Adelaide Festival Board (which has since been replaced). Writers’ Week itself was cancelled for 2026. My aim in this essay is not to follow every subsequent twist and turn, but to reflect on whether there are any lessons. Let’s start with Abdel-Fattah’s “past statements” that caused the Adelaide Festival Board so much angst.

#

 

Randa Abdel-Fattah does not merely argue that Israel should never have been established in the 1940s, that it has since committed international crimes, or that there’s a case for establishing a separate and functional Palestinian state. Instead, she has a constant record of calling for Israel’s destruction. This alone is enough to show that she has an extreme position on conflicts in the Middle East.

 

It’s been central to her rhetoric to accuse Israel of committing genocide or perpetrating a holocaust in Gaza. Such accusations inflame hatred against Israel, and while this need not, as a matter of logic, translate to hatred of the Jewish people, we can’t expect that everyone will make the required distinction. On the contrary, hostility toward Israel easily becomes hostility to Jews by association.

 

As I've argued elsewhere, there is a clear and overwhelming case that Israel has not committed genocide during its war against Hamas. Rather, it became involved in complex urban warfare against an unscrupulous enemy force embedded in civilian population centres. Nonetheless, the accusation of genocide has been made by many people, seemingly in good faith, and receives support from a variety of individuals and groups that claim to have expertise. By itself, therefore, it would not put Abdel-Fattah outside the mainstream of current debate in Australia, but it’s still a false and dangerous accusation. It tends to stir up hatred against the Jewish people – and in that sense it functions as a modern-day blood libel.

 

More disturbingly, Abdel-Fattah changed her Facebook profile picture on 8 October 2023 to adopt the stylised icon of a Palestinian paratrooper. This was only a day after the October 7 massacres carried out in Israel by Hamas and related groups, and the icon was widely used at the time to glorify terrorists who’d used powered paragliders to cross into Israel and launch attacks on civilian areas.

 

This is worth dwelling on for a moment. If we’re charitable toward Abdel-Fattah, we might accept her recent claim that she was initially unaware of the full extent of the atrocities. But it would have been no less repellent to display the paratrooper icon even if the October 7 massacres and associated horrors had been on a smaller scale – perhaps something more like the Bondi Beach massacre some two years later. Abdel-Fattah’s credibility is also undermined by her use of a social media account to mock victims of the atrocities close to the time when they were taking place.

 

Even if she was confused in October 2023, she had over two years to address the point before January 2026 when she was deplatformed from Writers’ Week. There was ample opportunity to express contrition and to distance herself from Hamas and any form of jihadist terrorism. Instead, she continued to use the paratrooper icon for at least a period of months and engaged in other troubling behaviour. Two incidents stand out in particular.

 

In early 2024, she was one of a number of individuals involved in leaking hundreds of pages of chats from a private WhatsApp group for Australian Jewish artists, writers, academics, and professionals, along with a spreadsheet containing names, occupations, social media links, and photos of numerous members of the group. This led to widespread harassment of Jews who’d been part of the group, including online abuse, boycotts, and death threats.

 

In April 2024, she took part in a “kid’s excursion” at a pro-Palestine encampment at the University of Sydney. Video footage is available showing small children taking part in chants such as “5, 6, 7, 8, Israel is a terror state” and in calls for “intifada”.

 

A dismal litany of Abdel-Fattah’s statements and activities could continue, but this is enough to illustrate the point. She holds an extreme position and has acted like a fanatic. She’s willing to radicalise children in anti-Israel ideology. To put it mildly, she’s demonstrated remarkable insensitivity to the interests and feelings of Australian Jews during a time of constant news focus on antisemitic incidents and jihadist terror. But did this justify deplatforming her from Writers’ Week once she was invited and had accepted the invitation?

#

 

The mere fact that someone has extreme views on geopolitical issues or has engaged in radical forms of political activism does not automatically mean that they should be denied public platforms. It certainly doesn’t mean that they should be deplatformed once they’ve been given commitments. Speakers should be able to plan their lives on the basis that invitations – once accepted in good faith – can be relied on. Conversely, honoring their commitments is foundational for the reputations of literary festivals and their organisers.

 

Perhaps the worst aspect of deplatforming is that it’s often done in an attempt to stop the expression of locally unpopular, but perhaps arguable, viewpoints. When this happens, it’s against the spirit of free inquiry and discussion.

 

In short, literary festivals should stand by their invitations – once accepted – despite possible controversy, and they ought to bear in mind that every deplatforming tends to normalise a bad practice. The more often it occurs, the closer we get to a cultural environment of endless tit-for-tat deplatformings. To some extent, this is the world that we already live in, but it’s to their credit that Australian literary festivals have largely resisted it until now.

 

Does it follow that literary festivals should never rescind speaking invitations – once they’re accepted – under any circumstances? No, surely that would be going too far. We can consider some situations where deplatformings might be defensible.

 

What if, between the invitation/acceptance and the actual event, the speaker says or does something so outrageous as to bring the event into disrepute – perhaps publicly identifying as a Nazi supporter, or perhaps committing a crime of child sexual abuse? Alternatively, what if earlier misconduct by the speaker – something not previously known to the organisers – comes to light? There could be very serious cases, such as these examples, or less serious or even trivial ones. I’m not suggesting that speakers be deplatformed over minor transgressions or over unproven and contested accusations, but some cases might be clear-cut and truly egregious.

 

Alternatively, what if it becomes known that the speaker is a charlatan unqualified to speak on an assigned topic? Perhaps giving a prestigious platform to such a person would give him or her an undeserved aura of credibility in public debate. Again, in a serious enough case it might be justified to deplatform the speaker, although organisers should perform due diligence before issuing such an invitation. What if the organisers and speaker have agreed on a topic (perhaps one where the speaker has particular expertise) but later on the speaker makes it clear that he or she insists on speaking about something completely different? Perhaps the speaker doesn’t have the required expertise for the changed topic, or perhaps the original topic was chosen carefully to fit a certain vision of the overall program. In cases like these, organisers need some flexibility.

 

We can’t write down a closed list of all the circumstances that might possibly justify deplatforming, because nobody can think in advance of every unusual situation that might arise. Still, arguable cases would usually have something to do with a speaker’s questionable conduct (or revelations about it) after the exchange of an invitation and acceptance. The threshold for justification should be very high, and accepting an invitation to speak at an event should not mean that you must – until the event is over – avoid expressing opinions that might be unpopular with the organisers.

 

In Abdel-Fattah’s case, I don’t suggest that anything in her record rose to the level of a crime or actionable misconduct, and anyway, the gist of her past statements and actions must have been known to the organisers before they invited her to speak. On the other hand, the Bondi Beach massacre drastically changed the cultural environment after she’d accepted her invitation. Might that justify the decision to deplatform her?

 

The festival board did not make a crazy or arbitrary decision. Its purpose was not to purge anti-Israel speakers from Writers’ Week, since there were others on the program who were also radically critical of Israel. Moreover, the board was confronted with an extraordinary set of circumstances that combined the shocking, and very recent, murders at Bondi Beach with Abdel-Fattah’s record of zealotry. The board had every reason to review the situation and to do something in response to the Bondi Beach massacre. Nonetheless, deplatforming Abdel-Fattah was a misstep.

 

Apart from the usual sorts of issues, it was foreseeable that deplatforming her would be counterproductive: it would inevitably generate more controversy about her views and her approach to activism. This would bring more attention to her past statements and conduct, distract from other aspects of the festival, and generate more community distress than if she’d simply been allowed to speak.

 

But the festival organisers could have taken other actions in response to the blood that was shed at Bondi Beach. These would also have triggered objections – probably from Louise Adler, the Writers’ Week director, herself given her own well-publicised hostility to Israel. But they needn’t have involved anything that looked like censorship or gave up the high moral ground.

 

For example, Writers’ Week could have recognised the painful emotions being experienced within the Jewish community in Australia, and therefore reached out with late invitations to some Jewish writers. It would not have been difficult to find appropriate and credible individuals who’d have been able to offer thoughts on the situation faced by Australian Jews, along with more sympathetic perspectives on the need for a Jewish homeland than the usual demonisation that Israel cops from Australia’s cultural Left.

 

Instead, the board took the option of simply deplatforming Abdel-Fattah. For this, it deserved to feel some heat, whether at Writers’ Week itself or in broader public debate. It’s not so clear that it deserved a response that ultimately destroyed Writers’ Week 2026.

#

 

The organisers of the Adelaide Festival had some warning of what might happen. Only a few months before, in August 2025, the Bendigo Writers’ Festival imploded just days before its scheduled start. At the last minute, organisers of the festival sent speakers a code of conduct requiring them to avoid “language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful”. Speakers were also required to comply with an anti-racism plan developed by the festival’s sponsor, La Trobe University, which included a definition of antisemitism modeled on the controversial working definition promulgated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

 

The reaction was immediate and vehement: over fifty writers and other participants withdraw from the festival in protest. They cited concerns over restrictions on free speech, but it’s clear that they were mostly concerned about being unable to present strongly anti-Israel perspectives. Abdel-Fattah was among the first speakers to withdraw, and she described the code of conduct as an attempt to silence Palestinian voices. Numerous sessions were cancelled, although the festival proceeded in a diminished format.

 

Organisers maintained that the code was intended to ensure “safe” conversations but it appeared to censor approaches and even topics. This was both restrictive and offensive, and it’s no wonder that there was a backlash. La Trobe University later issued a bland statement that, among other things, acknowledged the very late distribution of the hated code of conduct but seemed defensive about the university’s commitment to address safety and inclusion concerns. Unfortunately, this kind of safetyism has a potential to narrow the range of viewpoints. The code seems to have been targeted at aggressive criticism of Israel, but it would equally affect (for example) strongly worded critiques of Islam or other religions.

 

After seeing how this played out in Bendigo, the board of the Adelaide Festival should have known that deplatforming an outspoken anti-Israel activist would lead to trouble and perhaps even place Writers’ Week in jeopardy.

#

 

So many writers withdrew from Adelaide Writers’ Week 2026 that the entire event collapsed. Although I’ve placed blame on poor judgement by the Adelaide Festival Board, there might be plenty of blame to go around. What about the responses of these writers?

 

Some of them were wealthy and high-profile individuals who didn’t need money or exposure. Others might not have been wealthy but were people who receive numerous invitations to literary festivals and could easily risk withdrawing this once. But some might have made a real sacrifice for their cause as they understood it.

 

A relatively small number of the invited writers did not withdraw from the festival, and still wished to take part, even if they were unhappy about the decision to deplatform Abdel-Fattah. Some of these individuals were wealthy and did not need exposure, but it might have been personally meaningful to them to appear at Australia’s oldest and arguably most prestigious literary festival. Some who wanted to stay on the schedule might, indeed, have needed the exposure, but at least they were all promised a small honorarium for missing out. Some would-be attendees for the Writers’ Week audience might not only have been disappointed but even forced to cancel holiday plans. Some businesses and hospitality workers in Adelaide will probably lose custom or paid engagements.

 

In all, it’s impossible to calculate the net costs for everyone affected, but at any rate the collapse of such an event is itself a blow for Adelaide and more broadly for Australia’s literary culture.

 

Whatever the overall costs, some of the writers who withdrew probably behaved honorably. Perhaps they felt so strongly about deplatformings that they were unwilling to be associated with any event that had deplatformed a confirmed speaker. If they’d stayed on the program, they might have felt tainted. If all that’s true of them, they would have acted in the same way if the person who’d been deplatformed had been, for example, Tony Abbott, or a novelist (perhaps J.K. Rowling or Lionel Shriver) who is unpopular with Australia’s cultural Left. I’m not critical of whichever writers acted strictly on principle – but I wonder how many there were.

 

We’ll never know the true motivations of all these people, but here’s a thought experiment. Abbott was scheduled on the festival program for his new book from HarperCollins – what if he’d been deplatformed after a campaign to have him removed? Nobody can say for certain what the reaction would have been, but I’m confident that significantly fewer writers would have withdrawn in protest and that the festival would have survived even if it received justified criticism.

 

In the actual world, some of the writers who withdrew confined themselves to principled grounds when they made public statements, and in a small number of cases they even emphasised that they were not motivated by ideology. But others expressed personal support for Abdel-Fattah as if they agreed with her substantive views and approved of her pattern of conduct. Some unfairly accused the festival board of racism.

 

It might have been reasonable for writers or members of the public to announce their intention not to attend Writers’ Week in 2027 or thereafter without guarantees that nothing similar would happen again. But there’s an appearance that at least some, and perhaps many, of the writers were willing to destroy the 2026 iteration of Writers’ Week when it was at a late stage of preparation and irrespective of the impact on anyone else – not from high principle but out of ideological solidarity. It appears, too, that there was orchestration behind the scenes rather than a large number of individuals reacting independently.

 

This appearance of ideology and orchestration is strengthened by what happened at the 2025 Bendigo festival, where the anger was not from anyone being deplatformed. It’s further strengthened when we review Abdel-Fattah’s own record of intolerance.

#

 

In 2017, Abdel-Fattah was involved from an early stage in a public petition and associated campaign to block a speaking tour of Australia by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hirsi Ali is a prominent ex-Muslim activist and critic of Islamism, and indeed a critic of Islam itself, and for many years this has placed her in mortal danger from jihadists. Her tour was cancelled, and although this seems to have been based on security concerns, the petition and associated campaign must have contributed to the pressure on venues, insurers, and organisers.

 

It’s also known that Abdel-Fattah and nine other academics wrote in early February 2024 seeking that the Adelaide Festival’s invitation to the distinguished American journalist Thomas L. Friedman be cancelled. This request related to a short column in the New York Times in which Friedman had described ongoing conflicts in the Middle East in terms of animals’ survival mechanisms as shown in nature documentaries.

 

The board's response formally rejected the request to deplatform Friedman, emphasising (quite properly) that cancelling a scheduled writer was “an extremely serious request” and affirming a commitment to freedom of expression. However, it added that he was no longer participating “due to last-minute scheduling issues”.

 

Friedman has since stated that he was uninvited via an email citing timing problems, something that he accepted without seeking any further explanation. However, a former board member, Tony Berg, has publicly claimed that Louise Adler vigorously supported deplatforming Friedman during discussions prompted by the letter from Abdel-Fattah and others, so there is now some suspicion that the “timing” or “scheduling” issues were a pretext. This remains murky and is not something I can confirm. What is clear, however, is that Abdel-Fattah attempted to get Friedman deplatformed.

 

The offending column by Friedman was entitled “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom” – it was a short, quirky, satirical observation by a veteran journalist who was obviously exasperated with all parties involved in conflicts in the Middle East, including the United States and Israel. Friedman made apt (and humorous) comparisons between the political actors in the region and the behaviours of certain kinds of animals.

 

Critics of the piece apparently objected to its comparison between entities such as Iran and Hezbollah (and one individual person in the case of Benjamin Netanyahu) and non-human animals, but some nuance is required here. Philosophers and others complain about dehumanisation when confronted by a style of language that, as the American academic David Livingstone Smith has expressed the point, is often “a prelude and accompaniment to extreme violence”. In such cases, the people in a dehumanised group are presented as not really human at all but as demons, dangerous predators to be hunted down, or vermin to be exterminated.

 

But this language is totally different in its context, tone, register, and persistence from Friedman’s allegory, and skilled readers should recognise the distinction. When the Nazis portrayed Jews as rats in human form, or when the génocidaires in Rwanda called the Tutsis cockroaches and snakes, these were not isolated metaphors employed for a satirical allegory. They were systematic, relentless, state-supported campaigns of hatred intended to prime national populations for mass killing.

 

At one point, Friedman compared Iran to a wasp spreading its young in the form of terrorist organisations inserted into other countries in the region, and he observed that the United States – personified as a tired old lion – did not know how to kill the wasp without burning down the whole jungle. This could, I suppose, be interpreted by somebody sufficiently obtuse as a suggestion for nuking Iran. In context, it was a mocking comment about the clumsiness of American foreign policy and the destruction that it frequently causes.

 

Abdel-Fattah was also one of many writers, academics, and others who took part in a campaign to remove Jewish singer and songwriter Deborah Conway from the Perth Festival’s 2024 Writers’ Weekend program because of her support for Israel. This campaign singled out a statement made by Conway during a radio interview in which she alluded to Hamas’s recruitment of very young armed fighters – such as adolescents aged 16 or 17 – and misrepresented her as an advocate for slaughtering Palestinian children. Despite this, Conway was ultimately included in the Perth program, but she has faced a broader backlash in arts and literary circles, leading to other campaigns – some of them more successful – for her to be deplatformed from public appearances.

 

In short, some writers who withdrew from Writers’ Week emphasised commitment to freedom of speech and to debate across political divides, but it’s evident that Abdel-Fattah herself is not motivated by these values. For her, and undoubtedly for many others with similar views, literary festivals are now legitimate sites for anti-Israel activism. This includes, where possible, suppressing voices that support Israel or criticise Islam while rejecting any restraints for themselves.

#

 

Literary festivals are meant to be joyous occasions where people who love books might be able to see some of their favourite authors in person, perhaps get a book signed, catch up with news from the literary world, and of course hobnob with each other. They’re an opportunity to make, renew, or deepen friendships. The speakers often present fascinating insights into their process and craft – and would-be writers (or less established writers) in the audience can often learn a great deal.

 

Some writers do, of course, address political, philosophical, or moral issues in their work, and it can also be worthwhile to hear their perspectives. But writers’ political views should be only one facet of a literary festival and not the most important one. There’s room for conversation or even debate between participants with different viewpoints, and this could help audiences to ponder the pros and cons of issues for themselves– and it might even improve understanding between the speakers when they’re faced with intelligent people who disagree with them. Ideally then, literary festivals should include sincere, potentially useful conversations across political and other divides.

 

But in practice, this almost never happens. Thus, in a recent article in Eureka Street, Erica Cervini asks whether literary festivals can still host real debate, raising the point that some writers seem to go from one festival to another and that the usual suspects tend not only to have political views that they want to push but similar political views. Some of the larger festivals, including Writers’ Week, might as well be called political conferences because their guest lists are so dominated by politicians, journalists, and activists, most of whom offer variations on the same message. To be fair, however, Writers’ Week 2026 would not have been a total echo chamber, since it had scheduled some conservative speakers including Tony Abbott.

 

It’s complicated, but there are lessons from the Adelaide debacle. To reclaim literary festivals as celebrations of books, ideas, and literary craft – rather than platforms for political mobilisation and sites for conflict and scandal – organisers could begin by giving literature the first priority. This means a higher proportion of sessions devoted to authors discussing their writing processes, influences, and techniques, the state of publishing, or the pleasures and challenges of reading in an era of competing media.

 

Panels on literary and genre fiction, poetry, theatre, literary memoir, or translation could dominate the schedule, with political and ideological themes treated as part of the mix rather than the centre of attention. When politics does enter the conversation – as it inevitably will with many serious writers in all genres – festivals could design formats that encourage genuine exchange of views.

 

Festivals could reward speakers who are intellectually rigorous and temperamentally equipped for disagreement, rather than those who thrive on affirmation from like-minded colleagues and audiences. Organisers could seek out a broader range of literary figures – whether novelists, poets, critics, historians, or public intellectuals and essayists – who bring distinctive viewpoints and styles. Where politicians and journalists do appear, it should not be for name recognition, or even for topical relevance, but for their ability to model thoughtful disagreement, bridge literature and public ideas, and avoid descending into dogmatism, zealotry, and polemics. This still permits forthright debate, even on hot-button issues such as the war in Gaza, but in an atmosphere of basic respect and civility.

 

All of this requires festival organisers to commit to their events’ foundational purpose: joy in books and the life of the mind. To some extent, no doubt, this happens already – the picture is not completely bleak. At their best, Australia’s literary festivals are still welcoming spaces where readers of all stripes feel invited to engage deeply with literature, and when the moment calls for it, with each other’s differing views on the world that it illuminates.

 

But the recent drama in Adelaide is a wake-up call. It’s a reminder of what can happen when balance is lost and political zeal crowds out what makes literary festivals so attractive in the first place: their capacity to bring people together through a shared love of books and writing.

##

25 January 2026

Russell Blackford is Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle. His latest book is How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (Bloomsbury 2024).