Louise Adler resigns as director of Adelaide writers’ week | Adelaide festival

Adelaide writers week director Louise Adler has resigned after the Adelaide festival board announced it had removed Palestinian Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah from its literary event.

Adler, one of Australia’s most influential literary figures, said, “I cannot be a party to silencing writers, so it is with great sadness that I resign from my position as AWW director.”

“Writers and writings matter, even if they present ideas that disturb and challenge us. As our media closes down, as our politicians grow ever more fearful of real power, as Australia grows more unjust and unequal, we need writers more than ever.”

Adler announced his resignation in an opinion piece published in Guardian Australia on Tuesday. Since the board announced the cancellation of Abdel-Fattah’s participation in the 2026 event, nearly 180 writers, commentators and academics have withdrawn, including former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, best-selling author Zadie Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Percival Everett and Helen Garner, one of Australia’s most award-winning authors.

Abdel Fattah had previously faced sustained criticism from the Coalition and some Jewish organizations and media outlets for controversial comments about Israel, including the claim that Zionists “have no claim or right to cultural security”.

Adler was highly critical of the board of directors he worked with for the 2026 event; This was his fourth board since his appointment as director of AWW in 2022. Over the weekend the board was reduced by more than half and four of the seven voting members resigned, including chairman Tracey Whiting.

“The Adelaide festival board’s decision – despite my strongest opposition – not to invite Abdel-Fattah from Adelaide writers’ week, undermines freedom of expression and heralds a less free nation where lobbying and political pressure determine who speaks and who does not,” he wrote, condemning the board’s justification of community cohesion as the reason behind the decision to remove Abdel-Fattah.

“This is a managerial term meant to stop thinking,” he said. “You don’t need to be a student of history to know that art that serves ‘social integration’ is propaganda.”

Adler also cited previous board decisions of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (cancelling a concert by pianist Jayson Gillham), Creative Australia (Khaled Sabsabi’s withdrawal and subsequent reinclusion in the 2026 Venice Biennale) and the collapse of the Bendigo writers’ festival, stating that the decision was an example of a wider problem within Australian arts organisations.

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This column reflects concerns raised by 17 prominent cultural figures, all of whom hold senior leadership roles at the Adelaide festival, in a letter to the festival board on Saturday.

The signatories included the festival’s nine past artistic directors: Jim Sharman, Anthony Steel, Rob Brookman, Robyn Archer, Peter Sellars, Stephen Page, Paul Grabowsky, David Sefton and Neil Armfield. Director Barrie Kosky, who ran the festival in 1996, sent a separate letter to South Australian premier Peter Malinauskas and arts minister Andrea Michaels, requesting that Abdel-Fattah be brought back to the writers’ week programme.

The open letter condemned the board’s decision about Abdel-Fattah and challenged the SA government to appoint people with arts expertise to the board of one of Australia’s most internationally recognized cultural events.

“We note that there are currently none,” the open letter said.

On Tuesday, Abdel-Fattah called Adler’s resignation a “tragedy” and told ABC Radio Adelaide that Adler was “one of the most incredible directors and icons in Australia’s cultural history.”

“What we have now is Louise Adler, a Jewish woman, an anti-Zionist Jewish woman, who had to resign and withdraw from this festival,” he said. “What this really shows you is that her identity as a Jewish woman has now been erased, and this is an attack on me as a Palestinian and on Louise Adler as an anti-Zionist Jewish woman.”

Abdul Fattah denied allegations that he had made anti-Semitic comments in the past. “I never wanted Jews to be unsafe,” he said, adding: “Zionism is a political ideology, not a racial or religious identity.”

In 2023, Adler was criticized for programming multiple Palestinian writers at AWW, but argued that all writers were invited based on their books and not their political views.

“People are free to deeply object,” he told Guardian Australia after the AWW ended that year. “They don’t need to come or come, and you don’t need to agree with people’s opinions.

“But people listened. Thousands of loyal listeners in Adelaide listened to the speech with kindness and respect. That should be something that lifts the spirits of all of us.”

At the event in 2023, Malinauskas admitted that he was under great pressure to cut funding for writers’ week, but decided that having the government determine who would be allowed to speak would set a dangerous precedent.

In his resignation column, Adler pointed out that, contrary to his stance in 2023, the prime minister openly supported the decision to dismiss Abdel Fattah. Malinauskas denied that the academic put any pressure on the festival board to withdraw the 2026 invitation.

Adler, a former broadcaster and Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, has been a consistent advocate for free speech, the right to criticize Israel and the Palestinians’ right to speak freely, as other Australian arts leaders have wavered.

He sits on the advisory committee of the Jewish Council of Australia. He is also a former editor of the Australian Book Review, a former arts editor of the Age, a former presenter of ABC Radio National’s Arts Today program and a former president of the Australian Broadcasters Association. He also worked as general publisher at Hachette and as managing director at Melbourne University Press.

Adler’s paternal grandfather was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her father joined the communist resistance in Paris at the age of 14, while her mother fled Nazi Germany with her parents in 1939 because their extended family was killed by the Nazis.

Born in Melbourne, Adler studied in Israel, England and the USA, where he was a graduate student. Palestinian American academic Edward Said.

Talk about ABC’s 7.30 in 2023Adler recalled that after reviewing Said’s memoirs in the 2000s, he was summoned to a private meeting with an Israeli ambassador and ordered not to “air Israel’s dirty laundry in public.”

“This was one of my first experiences of being told that we did not speak publicly about our criticisms of Israel,” he said.

But he said his family’s history inspired his stance on Palestine. “This is important and it is vital for us not to look away,” he said. “We all have a choice: During the Second World War, the world turned its eyes away, and in this view, six million of our people, the Jews, were killed.

“And it is the duty of humanity to look at what is happening in Gaza right now and say, ‘We will not accept this. We will say no for ourselves.'”