Helen Garner, Melissa Lucashenko and Zadie Smith are among the more than 40 writers to have withdrawn from Adelaide Writers Week in the last 24 hours.

Some 90 participants, including key national and international guests such as Helen Garner, Toni Jordan, Trent Dalton, Melissa Lucashenko and Zadie Smith, have withdrawn in protest from Adelaide Writers Week, a core program of the 2026 Adelaide Festival, after the Festival Board’s decision yesterday [8 January] to remove award-winning Palestinian-Australian author and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from the Writers Week program.

Adelaide Writers Week in disarray as almost 100 writers boycott over Board’s ‘censorship’ of Randa Abdel-Fattah, artshub.com.au