Adelaide Writers' Festival was cancelled on Tuesday, after an outcry over organizers' move to ban an award-winning Australian author of Palestinian origin from attending the event, the organizers said.
The organizers also issued a formal apology to Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Macquarie University academic and novelist, after she was disinvited from the festival, planned for Feb. 28-March 5.
Abdel-Fattah rejected the apology, saying: "It is disingenuous, it adds insult to injury."
The apology only addressed "how the message of my cancellation was conveyed, not the decision itself," she said on US social media platform Instagram.
In its Jan. 8 decision, the festival organizers had said about the author of 11 novels: "given her past statements, we have formed the view that it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her."
The statement now appears to have been taken down from the website of the Adelaide Writers' Festival.
However, the decision triggered mass outcry, and the festival saw an exodus of participants, with former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern joining the growing list of people boycotting the event, forcing the organizers to cancel this year's festival.
Organizers accepted that their decision "created more division."
"It is never more important to understand that whilst this was all triggered by a blatant act of anti-Palestinian racism against me as an individual person, it is clear that settler colonial and white supremacist violence against one marginalized person represents violence against all marginalized people," said the Palestinian-origin author.
Earlier, the festival's director Louise Adler, as well as three board members, resigned following the backlash.
Abdel-Fattah, a sociologist with a PhD and a lawyer by training who writes both fiction and non-fiction, has been a vocal advocate for Palestinian people and broader human rights issues.
Born in Sydney to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother, Abdel-Fattah is a recipient of the Kathleen Mitchell Award in 2008.
"The genocide of Palestinians continues and that all of this is a smokescreen. I am not the story. Palestine is," said Abdel-Fattah.
The move by Adelaide Writers' Festival organizers comes as Israel continues to violate the ceasefire in the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza, where it has killed more than 71,000 people, most of them women and children, and injured over 171,000 others in a brutal offensive since October 2023 that has left the Gaza Strip in ruins.
