The Adelaide Festival has lost another sponsor as the controversy grows over Writers’ Week, with a third considering cutting ties – and two Ukrainian authors pulling out.
The director of Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week has defended the inclusion of a controversial guest after two Ukrainian authors pulled out of the event.
Ukrainian authors Kateryna Babkina and Olesya Khromeychuk withdrew from Writers’ Week in protest at its inclusion of Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa, who has repeatedly supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and attacked its President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Poet and novelist Babkina and historian Khromeychuk were due to take part in a talk titled Safe in an Unsafe World via streaming from London, where they are now based in exile, on March 5.
The talk’s moderator, Ukrainian-Jewish-Australian writer Maria Tumarkin, has also withdrawn from the event.
Writers’ Week director Louise Adler said she was “disappointed” that Babkina and Khromeychuk pulled out over the involvement of Abulhawa, who will appear in person at two sessions.
“They wrote to me directly that they couldn’t take part in a writers’ festival that included Susan Abulhawa, given her comments on Twitter,” Ms Adler told The Advertiser.
“I found that disappointing. I worked with Maria Tumarkin to create a context for writers, Ukrainian writers specifically, to be given an opportunity to talk about their experience as writers in this period of the invasion, and to contextualise the life they lead as writers in Ukraine.
Read the article by Patrick McDonald and Shashi Baltutis in The Advertiser.