A boycotted writers festival has appointed a fresh pair of hands after its sensational cancellation, and the new chief aims to help repair the literary event.
The founding director of Newcastle Writers Festival, Rosemarie Milsom, will take the helm at Adelaide Writers' Week after its 2026 cancellation.
Milsom, who will start the job in late-May and run the event from 2027-2029, says the festival does not need to change in response to the controversy that sparked its cancellation in January.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with it, I don't want to play into a sense that it needs to somehow be different," she said.
"I acknowledge there's going to be some repair needed, I'm not going to shirk that, and I'm wanting to help with that repair."
Writers' Week 2026 was sensationally scrapped in January after Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah's invitation to appear at the event was revoked in the wake of the Bondi terrorist attack, over her previous commentary about Zionism.
It sparked a mass boycott from more than 180 speakers on the program, resignation of longtime director Louise Adler as well as the Adelaide Festival board, and then cancellation of the entire event.
A newly-appointed board later apologised to Abdel-Fattah and invited her to Writers' Week in 2027 - developments Milsom cites as factors that helped her decide on the Adelaide job.
Milsom also faced pressure over programming the same author at the 2026 Newcastle Writers Festival, with NSW Premier Chris Minns labelling her invitation as "crazy".
The controversial writer appeared at several sold-out events at Newcastle in March to discuss her novel Discipline, as part of a program of 150 speakers including Kathy Lette, AC Grayling, and Bryan Brown.
The Newcastle festival's board has never discussed disinviting an author, according to Milsom.
"We have a really firm commitment to freedom of expression, it's very clear, obviously within the limits of the law. That gives you a really strong principle to stand on," she said.
A former journalist, Milsom is on the NSW government's literature board, and steering committee for the Global Association of Literary Festivals.
She won't be moving to Adelaide for the new gig, but intends to travel to the South Australian capital as much as possible.
As for the nation's literary scene, she cites artificial intelligence as an existential challenge for writers, and also wonders whether the current political climate will lead to timidity in the publishing industry.
Milsom states she is strongly against the notion of diversity as an exercise in box-ticking, and says she is determined to program literary events based on genuine engagement with authors and their work.
"I resist this idea that I have to divide my program and the people in it along any kind of political or racial lines - that is incredibly dangerous territory and in the very essence of it, it's racist," she said.
Adelaide Writers' Week will run from February 27 to March 4, 2027.
