Do we call this social cohesion? The war of words that ruined the 2026 Adelaide Book Festival | Adelaide Festival

It started as a quiet programming dispute in the elegant city of churches.

But by Wednesday morning, a frenzied six-day war of words had culminated in the end of the 2026 Adelaide Book Week and total institutional collapse.

What started with the secret exit of the business tycoon and veteran arts council member turned into boardroom carnage last weekend, with mass resignations, letters of demands from lawyers, and allegations of racism and hypocrisy by all parties.

By the time Book Week director Louise Adler got involved, the boycott by writers, commentators and academics had become global, and the state’s premier cultural event had become a hollow shell.

The cancellation of the AWW may only be the opening act. The wreck has now paved the way for a showdown in the High Court between TV – and so far Teflon – premier Peter Malinauskas, and controversial Palestinian-Australian academic Randa Abdel Fattah – the writer at the center of the row, and whose invitation to the 2026 event was withdrawn less than two weeks ago.

At the heart of the looming legal battle is the prime minister’s now-infamous Bondi comparison, which even Malinauskas’ allies acknowledge may have finally scratched his protective coating.

“Anti-Zionism”

The seeds of this stunning collapse were sown not in the heat of January, but in the thaw of last October’s spring, with the resignation of Tony Berg, former managing director of Macquarie and Boral Bank, and one of the festival’s major donors. The resignation may have been secret, but a letter sent to the festival board and the South Australian government on October 22 was a snapshot of the board in its final throes, allegedly being held hostage by an unyielding artistic director.

Berg, a self-described Zionist and governor of the Israel-Australia Chamber of Commerce, accused the festival’s leadership of presiding over a “blatantly one-sided” mission that replaced open debate with “revenge against Israel and Zionism”.

He claimed Adler had resolutely failed to provide balance in her programming since her appointment in 2022, and “spread anti-Zionism” through her choice of speakers. Abdel Fattah came to national attention with an Instagram post in which he declared that “Zionists have no claim or right to cultural safety” shortly after the outbreak of the conflict in Gaza. For Berg, her inclusion in the 2026 squad was the ultimate “travesty” – a move he claimed crossed the line from political criticism into anti-Semitism territory.

After watching the fallout from the other side of the world this week, Berg reiterated his position.

On Sunday, Guardian Australia reported on a leaked letter from the board that Jewish New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had been canceled from the 2024 program due to scheduling issues. On Tuesday, Berg issued a statement accusing both Adler and Abdel Fattah of a “selective” and “completely hypocritical” approach to free speech, alleging that it was Adler and Abdel Fattah who led the attack on Friedman, who wrote a controversial column comparing the conflict in the Middle East to the animal kingdom.

_{Sign up: AU breaking news email}

According to Berg, Adler and the festival’s senior leadership issued a comply-or-resign ultimatum to the board to force Friedman to withdraw, and the irony Berg pointed out appears to have been lost in the authors’ boycott of the festival.

Adler reacted by attacking Berg’s integrity as a board member but would neither confirm nor deny that she had issued an ultimatum.

Abdel-Fattah denies the claim that she, along with Adler, led the campaign to repeal Friedman, but she does deny that she was one of 10 Indigenous people and academics of color “who wrote a bibliography-and-footnotes dissertation on the harms of racist tropes.”

“We write letters on Google Docs to boards,” she said. “People who want to cancel us are being interfered with by prime ministers.”

Since last Thursday, Malinauskas has remained steadfast in denying any direct involvement, insisting that the board acted independently. He pointed to his defense of the festival in 2023 – when he resisted calls to withdraw funding for the event against a different group of Palestinian writers – as evidence of his long-standing commitment to artistic independence.

But he admitted he began lobbying for Abdel Fattah’s exclusion from Writers Week over the Christmas period, when he had “a number” of conversations with the chairman, leading to him writing a letter to the board on January 2, “defending” his point of view.

According to political observers on the ground in North Terrace, the fingerprints of political interference are difficult to ignore. By the time the Council took action, the Prime Minister’s Office had effectively sown in the local press enough concerns about “security and harmony” to ensure that the author’s dismissal would be seen as an act of public safety, rather than a political blow.

“despicable”

During the collective national grief over the terrorist attack in Bondi, the festival board and the South African government quietly conducted a cultural safety audit. Between Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, it came to its final conclusion.

The board chose to ignore the concerns Adler raised during these deliberations — but she wasn’t the only one. With the setbacks of the Venice Biennale and Bendigo Book Festival still in the public memory, the festival’s executive director, Julian Huba, has warned the board during multiple meetings of the inevitable repercussions of any move to dump a writer on the basis of his strident political views.

However, on the morning of January 8, the council allowed the first domino to fall.

Abdel Fattah’s reaction to its cancellation was swift, viewing the decision not as an act of communal harmony, but rather as an act of censorship and “blatant and shameful” anti-Palestinian racism. She said the council’s attempt to link her to the Bondi massacre was “despicable”.

The influential progressive think tank, the Australia Institute, launched the next attack, abruptly withdrawing its partnership and sponsorship.

What followed was a global literary rebellion. By the time the main event – former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – confirmed her withdrawal on Monday, more than 70 prominent literary figures had turned Pioneer Women’s Memorial Park into a site of contagion, announcing their boycott of the 2026 event on social media or through their surrogates. They included British novelist Zadie Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner Percival Everett, Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, and Russian-American journalist M. Jessen, as well as local stars Helen Garner, Melissa Lukashenko and Michèle de Kretzer.

At the very least, several participants have once again quietly informed AWW or Adelaide festival management that they are withdrawing – and behind the scenes, festival organizers have been pleading with the legendary British pulp band and its lead singer, Jarvis Cocker, not to formally cancel their contract to play at the festival’s free opening concert on February 27 at Elder Park.

The Prime Minister’s carefully orchestrated message on social cohesion has been lost amid the muted international protests.

Adler retreated to the quiet of her home, ignoring the constant clamor of media inquiries and calmly crafting her resignation statement.

Open letter

The board met on Saturday morning to discuss crisis management. It wasn’t “fun,” to use one attendee’s sarcastic understatement.

Another said: “It’s not over yet.”

In front of them was an open letter from the elder statesman of the South African arts scene, Rob Brockman, former executive director and artistic director of the Adelaide Festival. Demanding Abdel Fattah’s immediate reinstatement, the document was signed by former festival stars, including former artistic directors Neil Armfield, Peter Sellars, Jim Sharman and Anthony Steele. By Monday, the list of signatures will rise to 17, including Stephen Page and Robin Archer.

By the end of the meeting, the exodus had begun. Nicholas Link, a senior partner at major law firm Dentons, and the board’s core legal expertise, was the first to leave. Then Donnie Wolford, founding director of the leadership and training company Behind Closed Doors, and Daniela Ritorto, a former BBC journalist and wife of Federal Health Minister Mark Butler, passed away.

Its president, Tracy Whiting, turned off the lights with her resignation the next day.

On Sunday, without knowing that the board had become incomplete, Abdel Fattah’s legal team at Marque Lawyers sent him a letter. It was a formal challenge to the “cultural sensitivity” grounds used to ditch her, demanding her immediate reinstatement and an apology for the “malicious” characterization of her views as a threat to community safety.

With no board to govern and a list of boycotting authors that exceeded 170, Adler announced her resignation in Guardian Australia on Tuesday morning.

“I cannot be a party to the silencing of writers,” she wrote, calling the board’s surrender a “final betrayal” of the festival’s mandate. She noted that the pressure to impose self-censorship made her position “completely unacceptable.”

By the end of the day, the Adelaide Festival Corporation had pulled the plug. Writers’ Week 2026 is over before it even started. A new board of directors has been announced and, somewhat ironically, includes one of the board’s harshest critics – Brockman, who started the directors’ petition.

Bondi analogy

The Prime Minister stood amid the wreckage on Tuesday, offering the now-infamous “Bundy analogy”.

Seeking to justify Abdel Fattah’s exclusion, Malinauskas asked the media: “Can you imagine if a far-right Zionist entered a mosque in Sydney and killed 15 people? Can you imagine that as the Prime Minister of this state, I would actively support a far-right Zionist going to Writers’ Week and spouting hate speech towards Muslims? Of course I wouldn’t do that, but the opposite happened in this case.”

By Wednesday morning, as the festival company was emailing patrons promising refunds for the few ticketed events AWW holds each year, another letter from Marque rang out.

It was signed by the firm’s managing partner, Michael Bradley – who is also representing pianist Jason Gilham in a discrimination case against the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra – and served as a show-cause notice to the Prime Minister himself of the alleged defamation.

Via Instagram, Abdel Fattah accused Malinauskas of going beyond her previous statements in support of her removal from the festival, by linking it to the Bondi atrocities and indicating, by analogy, that she is “sympathetic to extremist terrorism.”

The new council met twice the day after its formation. Led by Jodi Potter, a veteran arts administrator and institutional coordinator for the South African government, it voted in favor of a public apology to Abdel Fattah and a promise of a gig at AWW next year.

As for this year’s event, members deemed it “tragic beyond repair.”

The academic who was in the eye of the storm accepted the apology wholeheartedly. But Abdel Fattah was not finished as prime minister.

“There is an extraordinary imbalance and abuse of power here,” she said, adding: “I am tired of the vicious bullying and lies about me.”

Asked whether he had gone too far with his comments to Bondi, the Prime Minister remained unrepentant: “My sole motivation has come from the desire of people to treat each other civilly and compassionately, for the benefit of humanity more broadly.”

Such concern for humanity has led to the institutional silencing of one of the country’s major platforms for intellectual discourse, signaling a new, more cautious era for a country that, since the Dunstan days, has prided itself on leading Australia in the radical and provocative.

It seems that the City of Churches has proven that it is not a haven for freedom of expression or difficult ideas. Instead, it became the place where noisy quests for social cohesion ended in the absolute quiet of a canceled festival.

This story was amended on 16 January 2026 to remove reference to the Adelaide Festival Centre, which is not affiliated with the Adelaide Festival.

This story was amended on January 17, 2026 to clarify that Tracy Whiting resigned on Sunday, January 11, and not at the board meeting on Saturday, January 10.