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Abdel-Fattah rejects the Adelaide Festival board’s apology after the cancellation of writers’ week
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Abdel-Fattah rejects the Adelaide Festival board’s apology after the cancellation of writers’ week

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Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah has publicly rejected an apology from the Adelaide Festival board after it removed her from Adelaide Writers’ Week 2026, which is now cancelled.
The board announced on Tuesday it would cancel this year’s festival, following the resignation of director Louise Adler and a mass boycott of invited authors protesting Abdel-Fattah’s removal.
“Because I have too much respect for myself and for my people, for those who have suffered irreparable harm due to the behavior of the administration, for the brilliant Louise Adler who was forced to resign on principle, I refuse and reject the apology from the administration,” Abdel-Fattah wrote on Instagram on Tuesday.
“It’s disingenuous, it only adds to the harm,” she said, adding that the apology only addressed “how the message of my cancellation was conveyed, not the decision itself.”
The board said the Jan. 8 decision to withdraw her invitation was made “out of respect for a community experiencing the pain of a devastating event,” but acknowledged it had instead caused division.
“We acknowledge and deeply regret the distress this decision has caused to our audiences, artists and writers, donors, business partners, government and our own staff and people,” it said in a statement released on Tuesday.

“We also apologize to Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah for the way the decision was portrayed and reiterate that this is not about identity or dissent, but rather a continued rapid shift in national discourse around the scope of freedom of expression in our country following Australia’s worst terrorist attack in history.”

The board initially claimed that statements from Abdel-Fattah’s past meant it would not be “culturally sensitive” for her to appear at the festival so soon after the anti-Semitic terror attack on Sydney’s Bondi Beach on December 14.
Abdel-Fattah described the administration’s justification for her removal as explicitly focused on her identity.
“I think we also need to pay close attention at this point to some of the fault lines that are being drawn,” she said.

“We must be very careful how the narrative is framed to equate all speech, undermining the right of marginalized people to call for the cancellation of those who incite harm in the name of the liberal principles of the so-called marketplace of ideas – as we all know, Indigenous artists and writers of color are paying the price.”

‘Decision was not about identity or dissent’

In a statement on Tuesday, the Adelaide Festival board said Adelaide Writers’ Week 2026 could no longer go ahead following widespread withdrawals by writers, commentators and academics following Abdel-Fattah’s removal. About 180 participants had reportedly withdrawn in protest.
The South Australian government announced that Judy Potter would become the new chief executive. She previously led the board from 2016-2023.
The cancellation follows last week’s announcement that Abdel-Fattah’s performance at the literary festival had been cancelled. She is the daughter of Palestinian and Egyptian parents and was an outspoken critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

She has previously been criticized by the Coalition, as well as some Jewish organizations and media outlets, for comments about Israel and Zionism, including a widely reported post in which she claimed that Zionists had “no claim or right to cultural safety.”

Abdel-Fattah has expressed her objections and criticism of Zionism: a political ideologyhave been conflated with anti-Semitism.
She has also said that her posting of an image of a Palestinian paratrooper shortly after the October 7 attacks, a move that has also been criticized, was intended as a symbolic expression of beleaguered Palestinians “breaking out of their prisons,” and that she did not support the killing of civilians. She said she was unaware of the extent and severity of the attacks at the time.

At the time, the board said it was “not culturally sensitive” to proceed, a decision Abdel-Fattah described as “outrageous”, saying she “couldn’t believe” she had to declare she had “nothing to do with the Bondi atrocities”.

Legal challenge pending

Michael Bradley of Marque Lawyers, who is representing Abdel-Fattah, said the collapse of the event was foreseeable once the board withdrew his client’s invitation, but emphasized that its inevitability did not reduce the severity of the outcome.
“The cancellation of the entire event was inevitable,” he told SBS News, adding that it was “an incredibly sad event and it was also completely unnecessary.”
He said responsibility lay with both the board and the South Australian government, arguing the consequences arose from their decisions and not from any conduct by Abdel-Fattah.
“None of this has anything to do with Randa,” he said.

“She was looking forward to sitting in the sun talking about her new book,” he said, referring to her 2025 novel Discipline, which explores the experiences of the Palestinian diaspora in Australia.

Bradley said Abdel-Fattah was now considering her legal position.
“Randa will consider her options just like she does with everything else going on,” he said.

He said that “her rights have been very, very seriously violated” and that she has been “inflicted with a lot of harm that she did not provoke or deserve.”

Prime Minister defends position while criticism increases

Meanwhile, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has faced questions over whether he tried to influence the board’s decisions regarding Adelaide Writers’ Week.
He has rejected these claims, telling reporters on Tuesday that the festival was “a strictly independent exercise” and “not a government-run event”.
“What Writers Week does to this community is their business,” he said earlier on Tuesday.

“That’s their event, their decisions.”

South Australian Prime Minister Peter Malinauskas said he had a responsibility “to advocate against any rhetoric that I believe encourages hate speech, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism or any other form of racism”. Source: Delivered / ABC

In response to questions about whether he had exerted political influence, he drew a hypothetical comparison.

“Can you imagine if a far-right Zionist walked into a mosque in Sydney and murdered 15 people? Can you imagine that as Prime Minister of this state I would actively support a far-right Zionist who goes to writers’ week and speaks hate speech?” he said in an emotional conversation with a reporter.

“Of course I wouldn’t do that, but in this case the opposite happened, and I’m not going to support that either.”

Bradley described the comments as “one of the most extraordinary statements I have ever heard from a public official, about a private citizen.”
“To come out with something so inflammatory and unprovoked – I don’t know why he did that, it’s a mystery,” he said.
The comments came hours after Louise Adler resigned as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, warning of a wider erosion of artistic freedom.
Acting Greens leader and arts spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young described the cancellation as “a dark day for the arts in South Australia” and said: “Prime Minister Peter Malinauskas must apologize for his intervention that led to this fiasco.”
“As Louise Adler has warned, writers week is the canary in the coal mine.”

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