Adelaide writers’ week was sacrificed to save the 2026 Adelaide festival, an event that ploughs more than $60m into South Australia’s economy each year, documents show.

After the 8 January announcement by the Adelaide festival board that controversial Palestinian Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah had been dumped from the AWW program, it wasn’t just fellow Australian and international guest writers and academics who began pulling out in droves.

Headline acts for Australia’s longest running and most prestigious international arts festival were also threatening to walk, according to freedom of information documents obtained by Guardian Australia.

Internal briefings prepared for an extraordinary board meeting held on 12 January – two days after three board members had resigned in protest and the day after the chair, Tracey Whiting, had stood down – warned of a “cascade of withdrawals” that could see the entire 2026 Adelaide festival collapse. AWW is overseen by the Adelaide festival board.

The internal briefings reveal major Australian theatre and dance companies programmed for the festival wrote to its artistic director, Matthew Lutton, warning they were “considering their positions” after the AWW boycotts began. The companies’ identities were redacted in the documents.

And while the local exodus was already in motion, management warned it was bracing for a second – and global – wave of cancellations, as the allegations of censorship and government interference reached international acts.

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If an announcement was made within the next 18 hours stating the 2026 AWW had been cancelled, the briefing said, “it may prevent artists from withdrawing from the 2026 Adelaide festival program and will avoid a cascade of withdrawals in the coming days, thereby mitigating reputational and financial damage”.

Any delays in announcing the cancellation of the AWW would “significantly increase the risk that the reputational damage from Adelaide Writers’ Week is transferred to Adelaide Festival”.

Moreover, the briefing said future Adelaide festivals could also be at risk.

“Currently, when invitations are extended to national and international artists, they accept without hesitation, as they do not consider the possibility that their values may not align with those of Adelaide Festival,” the briefing said.

“However, if artists were to withdraw from Adelaide Festival, expressing concerns about its values, this could create significant friction in future years. Such withdrawals might lead artists to hesitate before accepting invitations and to reconsider their willingness to associate with Adelaide Festival.”

At the extraordinary board meeting, AWW director, Louise Adler, told the three remaining board members, Lutton and Adelaide festival’s chief executive, Julian Hobba, that out of 165 AWW sessions, only 12 remained intact.

She urged the board to issue a full public apology to Abdel-Fattah and cancel the 2026 event – which was by this point unsalvageable – and concentrate on rebuilding for a 2027 return.

Adler then walked out of the meeting. Her detailed resignation statement appeared in the Guardian the following day.

The board continued its deliberations, ultimately deciding to axe AWW 2026.

While SA premier Peter Malinauskas has publicly denied his office exerted undue pressure on the festival’s independence, the FoI documents suggest his 2 January letter to the board was the primary catalyst for the crisis.

Minutes from previous meetings show that as late as 20 December, the board was standing by its decision to include Abdel-Fattah in its 2026 lineup, noting she had “a long and distinguished career in academia” and her cancellation “would risk placing her in the same category as individuals associated with hate-speech or hate-crime activity, which she is not”.

However, three days after Malinauskas wrote to the board, saying: “I am of the view that Dr Abdel-Fattah’s appearance should be removed from the Program”, the board complied, “in light of recent national events, and Government correspondence”.

“The Board agreed that Government involvement materially changes the risk profile and that failure to act could jeopardise current and future funding, and the Festival’s broader viability”, minutes from the 5 January meeting show.

Despite receiving $9.8m in state and federal funding, the Adelaide festival recoups almost all of that investment through more than $4m in ticket sales and more than $3m in sponsorship and philanthropy. It contributed $62.6m in gross expenditure to the South Australian economy in 2025.

In contrast, the AWW is the Adelaide Festival Corporation’s loss leader, driving foot traffic and hospitality spending to the state, but contributing virtually nothing to the festival’s box office bottom line. It recorded more than 160,000 attendances in 2025, but the vast majority of its sessions are free to the public.

In January, as the implosion of Adelaide writers’ week made headlines around Australia and the world, Rosemarie Milsom was watching closely.

The Adelaide festival board, which oversees AWW, had overridden the literary festival’s director, Louise Adler, and disinvited the Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah over past comments she’d made about Israel and Zionism. This decision resulted not in a quieter, less-controversial festival as the board members may have hoped, but a boycott by 200-odd writers, the resignation of Adler – followed by the whole board – a potential defamation lawsuit against the South Australian premier and the collapse of AWW.

It was not yet public knowledge then that, as the director of Newcastle writers’ festival, Milsom had also booked Abdel-Fattah, five months earlier. But Milsom had predicted this exact controversy could happen and had been preparing for months.

On Friday AWW announced that Milsom has been appointed the new director of AWW – a position she accepted with excitement and understandable caution. She is a frequent attender and admires AWW’s “wonderful” commitment to keeping sessions free: “I grew up in a single-parent family in Sydney and access to free arts events really shaped who I am … I’d be shocked if that changed.” She adds with a laugh: “I think if it did, there’d be much more substantial outrage than what happened this year!”

Back to that. Both Newcastle and Adelaide made the decision to invite Abdel-Fattah but only one imploded over it. So what went differently for Milsom?

In February, with the ashes of AWW still smouldering, the New South Wales Liberal MP Aileen MacDonald used state parliament to reveal that Milsom had also booked Abdel-Fattah, and questioned why the festival was getting $250,000 in state funding. The premier, Chris Minns, called the Newcastle festival “crazy” and “divisive” but said he would not intervene – by then perhaps mindful of the growing controversy surrounding his South Australian counterpart Peter Malinauskas’ decision to weigh in against the author to the Adelaide board.

Milsom, who built NWF from the ground up in 2013, stood her ground. She refused to put out generic press statements (“not worth the paper they’re written on”) and directly emailed every booked writer to promise no one would be dropped. She refused to comment on Minns’ “crazy” statement. And, crucially, as her inbox and DMs flooded with abuse, she reminded herself: none of it was really about her.

Milsom was born in Bosnia, into a Bosnian Muslim family, and lost family in the Bosnian genocide; as such, she has strong personal views on politics but also knows the value of objectivity in leadership, and the democratic function of literary festivals.

“Aileen MacDonald asked for our funding to be revoked and I remember thinking, come to Newcastle and say that,” she says. “Come here and talk to all the businesses, the hotels that are booked out, the hire car company that picks the writers up from the airport, the local caterer, the local printers, the musicians that play in the lunch breaks, the tech and sound company. All local. Thousands of dollars invested in this community, before you even get to the audience.

“I remember thinking, I dare Chris Minns to say that in Newcastle. There’s safety in being in Sydney and shooting arrows up the freeway.”

Despite – or perhaps because of – the controversy, audiences galvanised around NWF: this year it celebrated record attendance (a 27% increase on 2025) and there were no protests or boycotts. Milsom’s message to audiences is: “If you want to get sucked into a sensational media headline and buy into pressure from certain sections of the media or the community, that’s your choice. I will get on with my job.”

‘Arts organisations keep making the same mistake’

Milsom remembers when she first experienced pressure to disinvite writers due to their views on Israel and Gaza, back in 2024. “It was unprecedented,” she says. There was no plan in place for something that hadn’t happened before: “The level of emotion that people were feeling, the anger and frustration and hurt about what had happened on October 7 – justifiably so, it was horrific – had suddenly landed on us. And I could tell, if we were caught off-guard, wouldn’t everybody be?”

Milsom credits her 20-year career as a journalist for helping her cope. “I’ve known that pressure to not cover something,” she says. “It’s not a pleasant feeling. You lose sleep. But, at the back of your mind, if you’re a good, decent journalist, you know there’s a bigger reason for you doing a story … Translate that to a writers’ festival – that’s curatorial independence.”

“You have to know why you do what you do. That can get lost when you’re in the midst of an email barrage, or getting terrible threatening DMs and the writers are copping it as well. You basically just want it to go away. And I can appreciate the easiest way for that to happen is to just get rid of the writer – but that is never going to be the solution.”

Some arts organisations, including Creative Australia and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, have cancelled performances and excluded artists whose works or views on the Israel-Palestine conflict have come under criticism. But Milsom says that never achieves what they hope: “I’m really disappointed they keep making the same mistake. If you think the only way to navigate it is to appease one particular group, that’s not a fair response. What happens when you’ve got five groups coming at you? Do you appease all five?”

She worries that the pressure may start to shape decision-making at other festivals, where “they might go, I don’t want any Arab writers in the program, it’s just not worth the trouble”.

She credits the NWF board for backing her in the face of pressure over Abdel-Fattah. “When governance fails, you get what happened in Adelaide. If a board is weak and confused and scared and worried about what sponsors or government are going to say, they turn on you. Strong governance means you’re going to upset people. You will never please everybody. Your decision not to disinvite a writer will disappoint people. But you can move forward with have your integrity in place.”

But, she concedes, that doesn’t make it easy. “I have got to the point a few times with NWF where I’ve thought, I just can’t do it, I don’t want to do it, it’s all too hard,” she says. “I don’t envy anyone in this position. I’m just running a writers’ festival, I’m not running the country. I’m not making decisions about the federal budget, or whether we’re going to war …

“In some ways, it is so ludicrous … Everyone needs to take a step back and actually look at what writers’ festivals are, what we do and what’s at the core of it, which is literature. If you think it’s damaging for writers to be able to speak their mind, that is an alarming state of affairs.”

Adler was known for her vocal commitment to similar principles, and she was still overridden. Is Milsom confident she has the complete backing of the new Adelaide festival board?

“That was one of the first questions I asked, ‘Do you have true independence and policies in place?’ And they said yes,” she says. “If that other board had stayed, there is no way I would have applied. I don’t think many people would have, in all honesty. It could have led to the demise of AWW. That was the line that was drawn.”

So far only one writer is invited to AWW in 2027: Abdel-Fattah, who was invited in a gesture of apology by the new board. Milsom says she is yet to accept. “I appreciate people don’t agree with what she has said. But I still stand by the principle that she should be allowed to have those views and that shouldn’t affect her invitation to a writers’ festival.”

As for Malinauskas, who has been issued two concerns notices by lawyers representing Abdel-Fattah? “I look forward to meeting the premier – I really do,” Milsom says. “We’ll obviously have a professional relationship … I’m really excited about the next three years.”

It is her hope that when AWW comes around in 2027, everyone will simply be relieved it survived. “My sense of it is everyone will have moved on,” she says. “And if you’re still hand-wringing over what happened in 2026, then that’s really on you.”

The new Adelaide festival board has issued a public apology to Palestinian Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, and has promised she will be invited to Adelaide writers’ week in 2027.

Abdel-Fattah immediately accepted the apology, posting on Instagram that it was a vindication “of our collective solidarity and mobilisation against anti-Palestinian racism, bullying and censorship”.

She said she was still considering the board’s invitation to appear at the 2027 event.

In a statement on Thursday morning, Adelaide Festival Corporation acknowledged they had previously said they would exclude Abdel-Fattah from this year’s event “because it would be culturally insensitive to allow her to participate. We retract that statement”.

“We apologise to Dr Abdel-Fattah unreservedly for the harm the Adelaide Festival Corporation has caused her. Intellectual and artistic freedom is a powerful human right. Our goal is to uphold it, and in this instance Adelaide Festival Corporation fell well short.”

The new chair of the Adelaide festival board, Judy Potter, also extended the apology to Louise Adler, who resigned as AWW director on Tuesday in protest of Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation.

“We acknowledge the principled stand she took in the extremely difficult decision to resign from her role as director,” Potter said.

“Louise is a revered figure of Australian literature who we hold in the highest regard. Her contributions to, and stewardship of, Adelaide Writers’ Week in the time she has been the Director (2023 – 2025) have been outstanding.”

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Potter confirmed there was no possibility of the 2026 AWW going ahead.

“We understand that many in the community are urging reconsideration of the cancellation of Adelaide Writers’ Week in 2026,” she said.

“While we fervently share that desire, our informed assessment of the situation is that it is simply no longer viable for it to proceed.”

The festival’s executive director, Julian Hobba, told reporters at a press conference on Thursday that the festival will still pay the fee writers would have received had their appearances not been cancelled. However, he said this would not be extended to those who voluntarily pulled out.

The apology comes after Tony Berg, a former board member and the former managing director of Macquarie Bank, issued a statement to the media accusing Adler and Abdel-Fattah of a “selective” and “utterly hypocritical” devotion to free speech.

Adler resigned on Tuesday over Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation, and later that day, the Adelaide Festival Corporation announced the cancellation of the 2026 writers’ festival.

But in the statement circulated by Berg this week, the Sydney businessman said he was “utterly astonished” at Adler’s claim she had resigned in the name of free speech, and at Abdel-Fattah’s “outrage at being ‘cancelled’”.

“They both exhibit hypocrisy in defending free speech for some, when I observed them both to stridently oppose free speech during my time on the board,” he said, referring to the 2024 incident when controversial New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was scheduled to appear but did not do so.

Ten academics, including Abdel-Fattah, had written to the festival board on 6 February 2024, requesting it rescind the invitation to Friedman, who had published a controversial column days earlier, which compared the Middle East conflict to the animal kingdom.

The festival board responded three days later in writing, telling the lobbying academics that requesting the board to cancel an artist or writer was “extremely serious”.

“We have an international reputation for supporting artistic freedom of expression,” the letter said, signed by the board’s chair, Tracey Whiting.

“Thomas L Friedman was programmed to contribute online from New York. However, I have been advised that due to last-minute scheduling issues, he is no longer participating in this year’s program.”

Berg said: “Adler led a demand to the board to retract an invitation to Tom Friedman to participate in the 2024 Adelaide Writers Week.

“After Tom Friedman was invited to speak, Randa Abdel-Fattah had led a group of academics demanding that Tom Friedman be deplatformed. Then Louise Adler, Ruth MacKenzie and Kath Mainland put an ultimatum to the Board that they would resign if it did not endorse their recommendation to disinvite Friedman. In the face of that threat, the board felt it had no alternative but to allow withdraw [sic] the invitation to Friedman.”

Berg said he understood why a number of authors [more than 170] had turned down invitations to come to AWW 2026 on freedom of speech grounds.

“But they should understand that the people with whom they are standing, in fact, have actively undermined freedom of speech in the past,” he said.

“Unlike Adler and Abdel-Fattah, I support free speech, not on a selective basis but with a range of views presented in respectful dialogue.”

Adler responded to Berg’s allegations by accusing the former board member of breaching board confidentiality.

“I consider discussions of the board table to be confidential,” she said in a prepared statement.

“I’m rather surprised that a former CEO of Macquarie Bank has breached those confidences. It’s indicative of the way the former board operated, and I believe will make for a rich case study for future management students.”

Abdel-Fattah disputed Berg’s claims that she, along with Adler, led the charge to cancel Friedman.

“I was one of 10 Indigenous and academics of colour who wrote a researched letter with references and footnotes about the harm of racial tropes,” she said in a statement to the Guardian.

“What is missing in this is the question of power. We write letters on Google Docs to boards. The people who want to cancel us have premiers intervening.”

Adelaide festival has been approached for comment.

Abdel-Fattah announced on Wednesday she would be pursuing defamation action against the South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, over comments he made earlier this week.

Abdel-Fattah said she would continue her defamation proceedings against Malinauskas on Thursday.

Since last Thursday, the South Australian premier has consistently denied any direct interference, insisting the board acted independently.

“However, when asked for my opinion I was happy to make it clear that the state government did not support the inclusion of Dr Abdel-Fattah on the Adelaide writers’ week program,” he said.

The premier said he was informed of the new board’s decision to apologise to Abdel-Fattah after that decision had been made on Wednesday. He said he did not agree with that decision.

“My position is consistent,” he said. “I thought it through very carefully before I made a decision, based on facts and principles, and the facts that informed my decision have now been proven … Other people can explain why they’ve changed their position.

“I certainly don’t feel the need to change mine. I’m in favour of inclusivity. I’m in favour of consistency, making sure that all voices are heard.”

The Greens arts spokesperson, senator Hanson Young, said the premier also had to apologise.

“Peter Malinauskas must also now apologise to Randa Abdel-Fattah, Louise Adler and the people of South Australia,” she said in a statement.

The director of Adelaide writers’ week, Louise Adler, has resigned after the board of the Adelaide festival announced it had dumped the Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the literary event.

“I cannot be party to silencing writers, so with a heavy heart I am resigning from my role as the director of the AWW,” said Adler, one of Australia’s most influential literary figures.

“Writers and writing matters, even when they are presenting ideas that discomfort and challenge us. We need writers now more than ever, as our media closes up, as our politicians grow daily more cowed by real power, as Australia grows more unjust and unequal.”

Adler announced her resignation in an opinion piece published in Guardian Australia on Tuesday. Since the board announced the cancellation of Abdel-Fattah’s appearance at the 2026 event, some 180 writers, commentators and academics have withdrawn, including the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, the bestselling author Zadie Smith, the Pulitzer prize-winning writer Percival Everett and one of Australia’s most decorated writers, Helen Garner.

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

Adler was highly critical of the board she had been working with for the 2026 event, her fourth since being appointed director of AWW in 2022. At the weekend that board shrank by more than half, with four of its seven voting members, including the chair, Tracey Whiting, resigning.

“The Adelaide festival board’s decision – despite my strongest opposition – to disinvite … Abdel-Fattah from the Adelaide writers’ week weakens freedom of speech and is the harbinger of a less free nation where lobbying and political pressure determine who gets to speak and who doesn’t,” she wrote, going on to condemn the board’s justification of community cohesion as the reason behind its decision to axe Abdel-Fattah.

“This is a managerialist term intended to stop thinking,” she said. “One doesn’t have to be a student of history to know that art in the service of ‘social cohesion’ is propaganda.”

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

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The column echoes concerns raised by 17 prominent cultural figures – who have all held senior leadership roles at Adelaide festival – in a letter to the festival’s board on Saturday.

Signatories included nine past artistic directors of the festival: Jim Sharman, Anthony Steel, Rob Brookman, Robyn Archer, Peter Sellars, Stephen Page, Paul Grabowsky, David Sefton and Neil Armfield. The director Barrie Kosky, who led the festival in 1996, has sent a separate letter to the South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, and the arts minister, Andrea Michaels, demanding that Abdel-Fattah be reinstated to the writers’ week program.

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

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

On Tuesday Abdel-Fattah called Adler’s resignation “a tragedy”, telling 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 has had to resign and step down from this festival,” she said. “It really shows you that in this moment her identity as a Jewish woman has been erased and this is an attack on me as a Palestinian and Louise Adler as an anti-Zionist Jewish woman.”

Abdel-Fattah rejected any suggestion she had made antisemitic comments in the past. “I have never, ever called for Jews to be unsafe,” she said, adding: “Zionism is not a racial or religious identity, it is a political ideology.”

In 2023 Adler was criticised for programming multiple Palestinian writers at AWW but argued that all authors had been invited based on their books, not their political opinions.

“People are free to deeply object,” she told Guardian Australia after AWW finished that year. “They don’t have to come. Or come, and you don’t need to agree with what people think.

“But people listened. These steadfast Adelaide audiences came out in their thousands and listened with courtesy and respect for the conversation. It should be something that lifts the spirits of all of us.”

At that 2023 event, Malinauskas admitted he had been under immense pressure to axe the funding for writers’ week but decided it would set a dangerous precedent if a government determined who was allowed to speak.

Adler pointed out in her resignation column that, in contrast to his 2023 position, the premier had publicly backed the decision to axe Abdel-Fattah. Malinauskas has denied he put any pressure on the festival board to withdraw the academic’s 2026 invitation.

A former publisher and the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, Adler has been a consistent defender of free speech, the right to criticise Israel and the right of Palestinians to speak freely, as other Australian arts leaders have wavered.

She is on the advisory committee of the Jewish Council of Australia. She is also a former editor of Australian Book Review, a former arts editor for the Age, a former presenter of ABC Radio National’s Arts Today program and a former president of the Australian Publishers Association. She has also worked as a publisher-at-large at Hachette and as the chief executive of Melbourne University Press.

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

Born in Melbourne, Adler studied in Israel, the UK and the US, where she was a postgraduate student of the Palestinian American academic Edward Said.

Speaking on the ABC’s 7.30 in 2023, Adler recalled being summoned to a private meeting with an Israeli ambassador in the 2000s after she reviewed Said’s memoirs and being ordered to “not air Israel’s dirty linen in public”.

“That was one of my early experiences of being told that we don’t talk about our criticism of Israel in the public sphere,” she said.

But, she said, her family’s history had inspired her stance on Palestine. “It is important and it is vital for us to not look away,” she said. “We all have a choice. The world looked away during the second world war and the Jews, six million of our people, were murdered in that looking away.

“And that it is incumbent upon humanity to look at what is happening in Gaza now and to say, ‘We will not accept this. We will say no, not in our name.’”