Extract from The New Daily
Award-winning authors Trent Dalton and Zadie Smith have pulled out of Adelaide Writers' Week. Photo: AAP
Award-winning author Trent Dalton, known for Boy Swallows Universe and Love Stories, is among more than 40 authors who have withdrawn from a prominent writers’ festival after a Australian-Palestinian speaker was scrapped.
Adelaide Writers’ Week announced this week it had uninvited lawyer and Palestine advocate Randa Abdel-Fattah amid the “national grief” and “community tensions” triggered by the Bondi Beach massacre.
The festival stressed that it “did not suggest in any way that Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s or her writings have any connection with the tragedy at Bondi”.
So far around 42 writers have pulled out from the February event after the decision to cancel the author and academic over her “past statements” and “cultural sensitivity”.
Dalton, whose book was made into a Netflix series, joins a walkout that includes British novelist Zadie Smith (author of White Teeth), celebrated Russian author M. Gessen, former Greece Finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and Australian author Helen Garner.
Others are ABC Global Affairs Editor Laura Tingle, journalist and crime fiction author Chris Hammer, journalist Peter Greste, and award-winning Green Dot author Madeleine Gray.
Abdel-Fattah, whose book Discipline explores the experience of Palestinian Australians, said her removal was “a blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship and a despicable attempt to associate me with the Bondi massacre”.
“What makes this so egregiously racist is that the Adelaide Writers Festival Board has stripped me of my humanity and agency, reducing me to an object onto which others can project their racist fears and smears,” she said.
Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah will no longer speak at the festival. Photos: Adelaide Writers’ Week
The board said “given 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”.
Abdel-Fattah has been accused by conservative Jewish groups of sharing posts critical of Israel.
Former political prisoner and foreign correspondent Peter Greste said his decision to withdraw was “less out of solidarity with Randa, than it is about a protest at the festival’s decision to cancel someone for comments that they made before Bondi”.
“In my letter to the board, I pointed out that she’s being dropped not for anything she said after Bondi, or for any connection either direct or implied, to that horrific terrorist attack, but purely for things she said before the event,” he told AAP.
“I don’t agree with everything Randa says, but I don’t believe that we help things by cancelling members of our community at a time when we should be engaging with these ideas.”
M. Gessen, a previous winner of the US National Jewish Book Award for writing about their grandmother’s experience of WWII, confirmed to AAP on Friday they would no longer attend.
Other high-profile writers who have withdrawn include Hannah Kent, Michelle de Kretser, Melissa Lucashenko, Hannah Ferguson, Jane Caro, Chelsea Watego and Robbie Arnott.
Michelle de Kretser, Peter Greste, Zadie Smith, M. Gessen, Hannah Ferguson, Yanis Varoufakis are just some of the high-profile writers that have walked from Adelaide Writers’ Week.
State industry body Writers SA has also withdrawn from the event.
Kent posted on Instagram she was appalled by the decision to remove Abdel-Fattah.
“It is a gross act of discrimination and censorship I can in no way agree with,” she wrote.
Caro said she was “opposed to censoring any writer who deals with complex and controversial issues forthrightly”.
“I think the decision by the Adelaide Festival Board was an attack on the very things that make writers festivals the amazing events they are,” she said.
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young urged the festival to reverse its decision.
“Engaging in respectful, thoughtful debate and challenging ideas and opinions is the whole purpose of an event like this,” she said.
“Censorship and shutting down diverse voices, including Palestinian voices is the antithesis of an open, free and respectful democracy.”
The public list of writers understood to have withdrawn from the event:
Distinguished Professor Percival Everett
Distinguished Professor M. Gessen
Professor Yanis Varoufakis
Professor Zadie Smith
Professor Kenneth Roth
Professor Clare Wright
Professor Chelsea Watego
Professor Peter Greste
Dr Micaela Sahhar
Dr Evelyn Araluen
Dr Melissa Lucashenko
Dr Amy McQuire
Dr Bernadette Brennan
Dr Emma Shortis
Dr Peter FitzSimons
Dr Sonia Orchard
Michelle de Kretser
Hannah Ferguson
Amy Remeikis
Tasma Walton
Hannah Kent
Kate Mildenhall
Maxine Beneba Clarke
Roisin O’Donnell
Jane Caro
Drusilla Modjeska
Madeleine Gray
Bri Lee
Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts
Dominic Guerrera
Paul Daley
Ren Wyld
Emily Lighezzolo
Robbie Arnott
Marieke Hardy
Emilie Zoey Baker
Walter Marsh
Margot McGovern
Jonathan Green
Jennifer Mills
Nikos Papastergiadis
Mike Ladd
Vincenzo Latronico
Francesca Wade
Molly Murn
Lucy Nelson
Susie Anderson
Eoin McNamee
Helen Garner
Chloe Hooper
Sarah Krasnostein
Chris Hammer
Dr James Bradley
Laila Lalami
Tim Ayliffe
Natasha Lester
Cam Wilson
Ariel Bogel
Daniel Nour
Alisa Ahmed
Trent Dalton
Sam Guthrie
Jacqueline Maley
Jacinta Parsons
Matthew Hooten
Grace Yee
Trent Dalton
Laura Tingle
David Marr
Sue Turnbull
Andy Jackson
Louise Milligan
Larissa Behrendt
*Editor’s Note: The chair of the Adelaide Festival Tracey Whiting AM is also a director of Solstice Media, publisher of The New Daily.
-with AAP
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