For more than 65 years, book lovers have descended on Adelaide every summer for Australia’s longest running literary festival. That is, until this year, when around 180 invited authors (including me) boycotted Adelaide Writers Week, following the board’s decision to “uninvite” Palestinian-Australian author Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah. The festival was cancelled.
But Abdel-Fattah will appear in Adelaide this March, after all. She’ll be in conversation with former Writers’ Week director Louise Adler (who resigned over the fiasco) as part of a “guerilla” writers festival. It will occupy the space vacated by Writers Week’s cancellation.
The community organised festival, Constellations: Not Writers Week, will include a program of “Blak & Arab writers in conversation”, a day of children’s programming, a mini poetry festival (including J.M. Coetzee) and more. But as its name suggests, the much smaller festival is not actually Writers’ Week.
