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.

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.

Stephen Colbert has lined up his next job after finishing up as host of The Late Show in May: writing a new Lord of the Rings film tentatively titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past.

Film-maker Peter Jackson, who directed the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy, made the surprise announcement in a video on social media on Tuesday. Colbert is an avid, lifelong JRR Tolkien fan and even had a small cameo in Jackson’s 2013 film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug alongside his wife and children.

Deadline reported the film will be titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past and will be written by Colbert, Philippa Boyens and Peter McGee. Set 14 years after the passing of Frodo, the film will follow Sam, Merry, and Pippin as they set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile Sam’s daughter, Elanor, discovers “a long-buried secret that explains why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began”.

In a video with Jackson, Colbert said he was inspired to develop a story after rereading The Fellowship of the Ring, and thinking about chapters three to eight, which were not included in Jackson’s film adaptation.

“You know what the books mean to me and what your films mean to me, but the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in the Fellowship that y’all never developed into the first movie back in the day,” Colbert told Jackson.

“I thought, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies?”

Colbert said he then planned an outline for the story with his son, the screenwriter Peter Colbert.

“It took me a few years to scrape my courage into a pile to give you a call, but about two years ago I did. You liked it enough to talk to me about it … and I could not be happier that [Warner Bros.] loved it,” Colbert told Jackson.

Jackson joked that Colbert would have to find time to adapt the film, in reference to the highly contentious cancellation of CBS’s The Late Show, which Colbert has hosted since 2015. The cancellation was criticised as politically motivated, coming just after Colbert criticised CBS’s parent company, Paramount, for making a $16m settlement with Donald Trump, who has been vocal about his dislike for Colbert.

In response, Colbert said: “It turns out I’m going to be free starting this summer”, to which Jackson replied: “Isn’t that fortunate?”

The film will be produced by Jackson along with the franchise’s longtime producers Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh.

Colbert’s film is the second upcoming film in Tolkien’s universe. Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, which is set to be released 17 December 2027, will be directed by Gollum himself – Andy Serkis – and will follow Aragorn on his quest to capture Gollum during the time period between The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring, in order to keep the ring from Sauron.

The six Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies have grossed a combined US$5.9bn.

For almost a decade it has been the most epic fixture in West End theatre: a two-part play that runs for five hours, including intervals. But later this year Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will only be staged in London as a shortened, single production running 175 minutes.

The new format is in line with the other versions of the hit play presented in the US, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan. Its producers announced on Monday that a one-part production would make it more accessible, “allowing even more audiences to experience the story with one ticket and one visit to the theatre”.

Currently, in London, theatregoers purchase separate tickets for each part of the play, with the cheapest total cost coming to £30. The two parts (which each have an interval) can be seen on the same day, with a couple of hours’ break in between, or on different days. Prices for the new version, which has one interval, are yet to be announced. The two-part production will run at the Palace theatre until 20 September. The one-part version will open at the Palace on 6 October.

The play – which is the eighth story in novelist JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series – had its world premiere in London in 2016 and won a record-breaking nine Olivier awards. Rowling, who collaborated with writer Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany on the production, originally said that it was split into two parts because of the “epic nature of the story” which is set 19 years after the final novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The producers of the play, Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, said on Monday: “As new Harry Potter fans discover these stories every day, drawn in by their enduring power and the deep affection for these characters, we felt this milestone moment was the right time to make the production more accessible than ever before. Now running at under three hours, the reimagined production retains its scale, illusions and theatrical magic, and emotional depth, while allowing more audiences to experience the story in a single visit.”

The trimmed runtime should also appeal to theatregoers bringing young children (the show is recommended for over-eights) and those – not just children – who have shorter attention spans. But even at 175 minutes, the new Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will still be longer than many West End plays. Theatre impresario Rosemary Squire said last summer that audiences were put off by long running times “because they’re starting to panic and think ‘I’ve got to get up for work tomorrow’, and ‘When will I get the last train?’, et cetera … As an industry, we need to listen to that.”

It is not just an issue for theatres. Earlier this month, Clare Binns, the creative director of Picturehouse Cinemas, said: “I look at a lot of films and think: ‘You could take 20 minutes out of that.’ There’s no need for films to be that long.” Binns suggested that epic running times have deterred audiences returning to the cinema after the Covid-19 pandemic. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opened on Broadway in the two-part format. When US theatres reopened after the Covid pandemic, the streamlined one-part production took its place.

A seventh book in Rachel Reid’s gay romance series that inspired the TV drama Heated Rivalry will be out later this year but Australian fans are still struggling to get their hands on a physical copy of any of the preceding six books.

Unrivalled, the next instalment in the Canadian author’s Game Changers series, will be released internationally on 29 September, the publisher HarperCollins announced on Tuesday.

The wild success of the screen adaptation has driven a level of interest in the books that rivals that of Bridgerton, booksellers have told Guardian Australia, with paperback copies of the first two novels selling out within a day and backorders piling up.

“No one has it in stock, not even the publisher!” a Dymocks spokesperson said.

Heated Rivalry launched on HBO Max on 28 November and follows the sexual encounters and budding romance of two closeted athletes, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, competing in a hypermasculine ice hockey league. It is based on the first two of Reid’s novels, 2018’s Game Changer and 2019’s Heated Rivalry. The seventh novel will continue the story of Shane and Ilya.

The books were initially released in ebook format, standard practice for romance and for Reid’s publisher, the Harlequin imprint Carina Press. The whole series received a trade paperback release in the US in 2024 but, by the time the TV show launched, many fans were complaining that physical copies of the books were impossible to find.

A spokesperson for HarperCollins Australia said the novels had been available in Australia and New Zealand in ebook and audiobook format before December and the company had acquired print rights for Australia and New Zealand “as soon as we heard that the series was coming to HBO Max in Australia in late November”.

“We went to print immediately and print copies of books one and two were available from 18 December, with books three through six available from Tuesday 27th January,” the spokesperson said. “The delay was due to the printer being closed over the Christmas break.”

That initial print run was not remotely enough for what booksellers said was a level of interest that rivalled Bridgerton.

A spokesperson from Dymocks told Guardian Australia the bookseller’s initial stock of Game Changer and Heated Rivalry had sold out within a day.

“We currently have significant customer orders for the next shipment, plus similar numbers for the next four books in the series due out in a couple of weeks,” the spokesperson said. “It’s been our most-searched title online every week since mid-December.”

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Dymocks said reprints were due to arrive in store next week and the store hoped to have stock available before next weekend, provided there were no shipping delays.

Sophie Higgins, the head of merchandise at Booktopia, said the store had been selling more than 100 copies a day of the paperback editions of the series, including those that haven’t been released in print yet, and had sold more than 10,000 copies so far. All six books in the series had been in Booktopia’s top 10 bestsellers since the show began airing, Higgins said, and the level of interest in the ebooks had been similar.

“We’ve seen this kind of sudden demand at Booktopia before for series like Fifty Shades of Grey, driven by word of mouth and social media buzz,” Higgins said. “The other example of a series that had been out for years and was even out of print before the Netflix series aired is the Bridgerton series by Julia Quinn.”

Nick Croydon, the chief executive of QBD Books, said there had been a “clear and sustained surge in interest” in the books since the TV adaptation launched in November.

“What’s notable is that this interest extends beyond the currently released titles, with readers actively searching for and preordering books across the full series,” Croydon said. “The entire series landed in our top 20 searched books for the month.”

The series had also generated more online product reviews than the July release of a limited-edition Fourth Wing special by Rebecca Yarros, which Crydon said was “a benchmark moment for romantasy readership in Australia”. It had also exceeded the engagement levels of the Arnott’s Cookbook, which went viral in October, by 19%.

“This places Heated Rivalry firmly within the realm of culturally driven book phenomena rather than a typical genre release,” Croydon said, suggesting that the series is “breaking out beyond its core romance audience” and indicating “a long-term series obsession rather than a short-lived spike”.

HarperCollins told the New York Times in December that 650,000 books had been sold in the Game Changers series, though the publisher did not distinguish between ebook and paperback editions. Its executive vice-president Brent Lewis said: “The community around these books felt like a small town before the show. Overnight, it became a big city. We couldn’t be happier for Rachel.”

Reid has not commented publicly on the shortfall in print copies, with the exception of responding “I’m with you 😖” to an Instagram post in December by a fellow romance writer and critic, Ella Dawson, that begged HarperCollins to print more copies.

Box office earnings in October have crashed to levels not seen since the late 1990s, with Halloween weekend becoming the worst of the year so far.

According to a report in Variety, cinema takings for October in North America totalled $425m (£323m), the lowest figure since October 1997, when it was $385m – not counting October 2020, when North American cinemas only took $63m as moviegoing was severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

A number of factors have been blamed for the poor results. Notably, there was a paucity of putative blockbusters, with the only large-scale effects movie on release being Tron: Ares, which took $67m in North America, as part of a disappointing $133m worldwide gross against its $180m reported budget.

Also disappointing was the performance of so-called “awards season” films, with Dwayne Johnson wrestling movie The Smashing Machine, Julia Roberts #MeToo drama After the Hunt, and music biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere all grossing less than expected.

The end of October customarily delivers a boost from horror movies, but with the date of Halloween falling on a Friday, when a large section of the intended audience would be otherwise occupied, box office receipts for the weekend of 31 October to 2 November were the lowest of the year, with a total of $48.3m. Also contributing to the disappointment was the absence of any successful horror releases: the leading horror release of the season, Black Phone 2, managed $8m over the Halloween weekend, while the putatively buzzy Shelby Oaks performed poorly, taking just $770,000 from its relatively significant release in more than 1,700 theatres.

Cinemagoing over the Halloween weekend in North America was also affected by the climax of baseball’s World Series, which finished in the early morning of 2 November.

Box office analyst Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations told Variety: “The major releases this month failed to deliver. Simple as that.”

He added: “Apart from the moderately successful Black Phone 2, there just weren’t enough horror films to entice moviegoers. That should be a no-brainer.”

The news wasn’t all bad though: Taylor Swift’s The Official Release Party of a Showgirl saw huge activity on its only weekend in cinemas, taking $34m between 3 and 5 October .

Lamplighters, pavement artists, babysitters – they have taken on whole new meanings thanks to John le Carré. As his fans will know, they are part of tradecraft practised by the spies he wrote about so evocatively. Now, almost five years after his death, an exhibition, with the title Tradecraft, reveals the techniques and motivations of the characters’ real creator, David Cornwell.

As you enter the exhibition in Oxford University’s Bodleian library you are greeted with a large portrait of Cornwell, wearing a black bucket cap, looking straight ahead with piercing eyes, his chin resting on his gently clasped hands. Accompanying the photo are two of his quotes. “I am not a spy who writes novels, I am a writer who briefly worked in the secret world,” one says. The second, after questioning whom, if anyone, we can trust, continues: “What is loyalty – to ourselves, to whom, to what? Whom, if anyone, can we love? And what is the caring individual’s relationship to the institutions he services?”

They are questions that had confronted him since childhood, with a mother who abandoned and lied to him and a father, Ronnie, a conman and fantasist who spent time in prison. Among the books that feature in the exhibition is A Perfect Spy, which he called the most autobiographical of his novels, whose central character, Magnus Pym, is obsessed with his father, Rick, a seductive fraudster.

Betrayal and spying are, of course, the dominant themes of his cold war novels featuring his hero George Smiley – themes which Cornwell experienced first in fact, then in fiction. After spending national service in the army’s intelligence corps, he was offered a place at Lincoln College, Oxford. The exhibition includes caricatures he sketched for the college publication, the Lincoln Imp. There are articles written for the journal Oxford Left. His fellow contributors were among those on whom Cornwell passed information to MI5, one of his first tasks for the agency, one he said later he regretted.

A handwritten note shows how uncomfortable he was amid early speculation about his own spying. “Why do people want me to have views about spying? If I wrote about love, or cowboys, even sex, people would take it that this was my interest and therefore I made up stories about it,” he wrote.

His college fellow and rector was Vivian Green with whom Cornwell developed a close relationship (he sketched Green for the Imp). Green had been Cornwell’s tutor at Sherborne school and presided over Cornwell’s marriage to his first wife, Ann Sharp. A reference from Green reveals that he described his former pupil as “congenial, pleasant and loyal”. A Lincoln tutor later recorded: “Mr Cornwell has done his medieval texts very intelligently,” adding: “He must make more of his facts.” It was advice Cornwell, unknowingly at the time, was to seize with astonishing results.

Although Smiley, portrayed by Alec Guinness in the BBC television series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, was a composite character, correspondence between the actor and the novelist featured in the exhibition shows how much Cornwell was inspired by Green. Cornwell, as le Carré, once wrote: “George Smiley must have all the qualities I lacked: Vivian’s patience, his sagacity, his discretion, his memory. And that peculiar loneliness that comes from knowing and seeing a lot that you can’t do much about.”

Fact and fiction seemed to merge when a younger Smiley is described at Oxford as “donnish” but “much slimmer”. In a letter to Cornwell, Guinness questioned whether he was suitable for the role of Smiley. “Although thick-set I am not really rotund or double-chinned,” he wrote.

The exhibition includes what he called an “observation”. “From the very first book,” Cornwell wrote, “my central characters have been forced to ask themselves what they owe to Caesar, and what they owe to their consciences.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war Cornwell turned his attention to contemporary issues that struck his conscience.

The exhibition shows the extent to which Cornwell, much like a journalist, relied on sources – they included his former colleagues in MI6 – and how he travelled extensively to research his plots. He consulted widely on the arms trade for The Night Manager, and the pharmaceutical industry for The Constant Gardener. He accused the industry – the subject of much controversy now – of “obsessive secrecy at all levels”. He noted: “Pharma Speak … Be grateful for our brilliant successes and pay whatever we tell you and shut up.”

Drafting The Mission Song, about a western coup plot in eastern Congo, Cornwell described “corporate responsibility” as “the other Heart of Darkness”. The main character of A Most Wanted Man was based on the real story of Murat Kurnaz, a Turk brought up in Germany and rendered to Guantánamo Bay. Cornwell checked with the manager of the Hotel Bellevue Palace in Berne, Switzerland, to ask whether he could name the establishment in the money-laundering and mafia plot Our Kind of Traitor. He met the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat while writing The Little Drummer Girl, in a plot with striking contemporary resonances.

Some former ministers and spy chiefs have expressed regret, and some concern, about what they criticised as a cynical tone and negative message in Cornwell’s novels. Others have welcomed the debates he has provoked. Cornwell mentioned some years ago how he had been invited by MI5 to give a talk to their officers. He was welcomed but told them he was unlikely to be accepted if he applied to join the agency again.

• Tradecraft at the Weston library, the Bodleian, Oxford, runs until 6 April.

March 27, 2025
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Over 40% of people who die by suicide  visit a health care provider in the month before their death, underscoring the critical role of health care settings in suicide prevention. Researchers have been trying to find better ways of quickly and accurately detecting suicide risk in these settings. One tactic that has shown promise is analyzing electronic health records (EHRs) to quickly identify people in need of help.