Concern at writers’ fest activism
"Every session that is planned needs to reflect the values of the festival," wrote Kathy Shand.
After Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF) chair Kathy Shand resigned last month over pro-Palestinian activism in the upcoming 2025 speaker line-up, the festival’s artistic director Ann Mossop has defended the programming, unveiled on March 13, stating, “It’s not a political festival, it’s a writers’ festival.”
In her resignation statement, Shand, a well known Sydney business figure, wrote, “Freedom of expression cannot and should not be used as a justification to accept language and conversations that compromise the festival as a safe and inclusive space for all audiences. Every session that is planned needs to reflect the values of the festival and represent the highest standard of consideration and curation.”
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Peter Wertheim said, “I doubt that most people in the Jewish community will feel reassured by Ms Mossop’s claim that writers will not be coming to the writers’ festival to prosecute a political point of view. The track record of several of the writers who are scheduled to appear suggests strongly that the opposite is true.”
“A great pity” is how Michael Gawenda, former editor of The Age, described the festival not inviting more Jewish Australian and Israeli writers. A late inclusion to the May 19-25 event, Gawenda will hold a session on his autobiography My Life As a Jew, published on the eve of the Hamas attacks. He will also take part in a forum on antisemitism with Palestine advocate Philippe Sands.
Ittay Flescher, an Israel-based writer who grew up in Australia and wrote The Holy and the Broken and Netherlands-based Yael van der Wouden, author of The Safekeep are Jewish writers who will take part.
But Gawenda said Jewish writers will be far outnumbered by “a whole lot of writers from the western suburbs of Sydney”.
“Those writers are organised, those writers get grants, those writers are supported,” he told The AJN. “They are a group who assert themselves, and they just had to be at the festival. We don’t have a Jewish equivalent of that.”
Mossop said Bankstown Poetry Slam will feature Palestinian poet Plestia Alaqad, whose book The Eyes of Gaza “documents the resilience of those living through ongoing violence and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza”. The slam will be hosted by Bilal Hafda, who organises pro-Palestinian literary protests.
A panel session, Stories of Palestine, will be moderated by Micaela Sahhar, an Australian-Palestinian writer, and will feature Hasib Hourani, a Lebanese-Palestinian writer on “Palestinian displacement”, and Sara Haddad, author of The Sunbird, a novel about a Palestinian refugee.
But Mossop said, “Only a handful of events actually talk about Israel and Palestine.”
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