A tale of two literary festivals

ANTHONY KLAN

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Which one – it turned out – depended on whether or not you crumbled to vested interests.

Sydney Writers’ Festival has celebrated its most successful event in its 29-years — breaking “every sales and attendance record in our history”.

Yet 650 kilometres to the west, Adelaide Writers’ Week, founded 63 years ago, has unquestionably had its worst year on record — with the event cancelled entirely.

“If anything else, (booking us is)…the commercially viable thing to do,” said journalist Antoinette Lattouf, to a sold-out crowd of 1,000 last Saturday.

Lattouf and award-winning author Randa Abdel-Fattah — both silenced following behind-the-scenes campaigning by pro-Israel lobbyists — stormed the Sydney event, helping underpin its record success.

“When you buy Randa’s book…you are signalling to those who wish to influence our institutions, our government policies, that you’re not ok with it,” said Lattouf.

The pair, along with author Michael Mohammed Ahmad, took the festival’s biggest stage, to host a panel “Silenced”.

Tickets to the sold-out show — one of three sessions featuring Abdel-Fattah that day — cost $45 each.

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The cancellation of the Palestinian Australian from the Adelaide Writers’ Week — where she was to be part of a single panel — saw a mass boycott by fellow authors in defence of free speech.

Within days, the whole event was cancelled and the entire board of the Adelaide Festival, which oversaw the event, was ousted.

Adelaide Writer’s Week, which had been widely considered the nation’s most prestigious literary event, last year reported over 160,000 attendees.

Both ALP South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas and ALP NSW Premier Chris Minns exerted extensive pressure on the respective festivals to cancel Abdel-Fattah.

Unlike Adelaide, Sydney refused to buckle.

 

Proponents of free speech and the nation’s democratic freedoms say the contrast highlights some of the serious harm being caused by parts of the pro-Israel lobby — and by those in power who choose to bow to its demands.

“The fact is, if you are impartial over a genocide, you’re pro-genocide” — Randa Abdel-Fattah

Just days before taking the stage, Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline was named a finalist for the nation’s most prestigious book prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Abdel-Fattah told the festival audience she had struggled to write the work — but had been powered by “revenge”.

“For me, it was my ability to actually take my experiences, the experience of my peers and colleagues…who had been silenced in schools, in media rooms,” she said.

“And able to creatively write something that speaks to their experience, validates their experience, and responds to the gaslighting, the profound gaslighting that we are experiencing”.

The session was moderated by Walkley Award-winning journalist Jan Fran, who, with Lattouf, is the co-founder of Ette Media and podcast We Used to be Journos.

 

Like Abdel-Fattah, Lattouf was subject to a campaign of silencing from pro-Israel lobbyists.

“The ABC let down the Australian public badly when it abjectly surrendered the rights of its employee Ms Lattouf to appease a lobby group” — Justice Rangiah

She was fired from the ABC, having shared, on her personal Instagram account, a post by Human Rights Watch that reported Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.

Lattouf sued for unlawful termination, won, and has been awarded a total of $220,000.

Justice Darryl Rangiah in September said the ABC surrendered “to the demands of the Pro-Israel lobbyists” ignoring its legal obligation of “independence and integrity”.

“The ABC let down the Australian public badly when it abjectly surrendered the rights of its employee Ms Lattouf to appease a lobby group,” Justice Rangiah said.

“The ABC surrendered ‘to the demands of the Pro-Israel lobbyists’, said Justice Rangiah”

Lattouf’s non-fiction book, Women Who Win: Celebrating Courage, Conviction and Change, published in April, covers her battle with the ABC and examines the stories of “other woman across history who challenged authority”.

Speaking at the sold-out Sydney Writers’ Festival event, Lattouf said her 2024 sharing of the Human Rights Watch post had been “weaponised” against her.

“When I was called into the office, they were like, ‘this post has questioned your impartiality and brought the ABC’s reputation into disrepute’,” Lattouf said.

“The only people who brought the ABC’s reputation into disrepute was the ABC management and board”.

“The only people who brought the ABC’s reputation into disrepute was the ABC management and board” — Antoinette Lattouf

 

Lattouf said the legal battle had played out like “a kind of weird black comedy”, with ABC management unable to say which policy she had broken.

“Sometimes actual policies are used as a cudgel, and other times they’re just fabricated,” Lattouf said.

“They’re just made up. It’s some kind of breach of some kind of nefarious thing that doesn’t exist”.

Lattouf said selling out the panel event was “really powerful”.

“It signals to the next writers’ festival, which will no doubt get pressure, that this is, if anything else, not only the moral thing to do, it’s the commercially viable thing to do,” she said.

“It signals (this is)…not only the moral thing to do, it’s the commercially viable thing to do” – Antoinette Lattouf

“You are signalling…that this sort of creeping authoritarianism and the erosion of civil liberties…that you’re not ok with that, and that you want to hear us speak.

“(That you’re not ok with) punishing people who dare to show empathy of concern for Palestinians in this moment, or Lebanese people in this moment,” Lattouf said.

Ahmed in February published Bugger, an account of a 10-year-old boy who is sexually abused by his 17-year-old cousin, in a work drawing on his own experience of childhood sexual abuse.

He is also the author of The Lebs, published in 2018, and The Other Half of You (2021), which were both shortlisted for the Miles Franklin.

“The problem with the conversation around child abuse is that more often than not, it’s perpetrated by a family member, somebody very close to a family,” Ahmed said.

“And for that reason, it’s always very likely that the family will cover it up”.

 

Silenced

Fran said the panel, called “Silenced”, was being held in an “enormous room of a thousand people”.

“I know a question you always get is ‘hasn’t this actually been good for you?’”

 

Lattouf said this was regularly put to her, “sometimes in really polite ways”.

“It’s like congratulating someone for surviving a dog mauling,” Lattouf said.

“It’s like congratulating someone for surviving a dog mauling” — Antionette Lattouf

“It’s like you got up, not only did you survive the mauling, but you continued to walk.

“I think it’s because the expectation is that we are decimated in this process and that we go away,” she said.

 

Abdel-Fattah said some people “may be asking it in a genuine way”.

But for others who said “you haven’t been silenced, look at you now”, it was a “very myopic view of the world” to “ask a Palestinian, you’re in a good place now, aren’t you?”

“It just speaks to…the green-screen of our lives, which is a constant, ongoing genocide” — Abdel-Fattah

“I mean, if tomorrow I could become anonymous, never publish a book again, but my people were not enduring a genocide, I would take that happily,” Abdel-Fattah said.

“And so I think it just speaks to the absolute erasure of what is happening, in the green-screen of our lives, which is a constant, ongoing genocide”.

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Thank you,

Anthony Klan

Editor, The Klaxon