Adelaide writers’ week sacrificed to save city’s prestigious arts festival, documents show

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. …