How Constellations rose from the ashes of the cancelled Adelaide Writers' Week
Journalist and advocate for press freedom Peter Greste (right) was among the speakers at Constellations, which emerged after Adelaide Writers' Week was cancelled. (Supplied: Sia Duff)
The roots of Constellations: Not Writers' Week in South Australia formed before Adelaide Writers' Week (AWW) was even cancelled.
It grew from a meeting of about 25 authors, publishers, booksellers and other members of the local literary community in early January, as they tried to figure out how to respond to the news of the disinvitation of Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from AWW by the Adelaide Festival board.
Many had already boycotted the writers' festival, which usually runs as part of Adelaide Festival. More than 180 authors would eventually withdraw from AWW.
At that first meeting, some people who had been involved with programming sessions for AWW suggested they wanted to move forward with new versions of events.
Emily Hart, co-director of indie publisher Pink Shorts Press explains the thinking: "If we all still want to do versions of our events, we should just be doing them under the same umbrella."
Within days, AWW would be cancelled, with its director Louise Adler, who had not been involved in the decision to disinvite Abdel-Fattah, and the board resigning. The board was quickly replaced and an apology to Abdel-Fattah and Adler followed.
At the same time, a new, decentralised writers' festival was emerging.
K A Ren Wyld, a Martu author who programmed an afternoon of events titled Rivers of Reason: Blak & Arab Writers in Conversation, says the idea was to "fill the gap" left by AWW.
"[Let's] show that the reading and writing community in South Australia is very strong, and we do want events here still," she says.
The new writers' festival would have no director but be driven by a collective will — from writers, booksellers, writers' groups and more — to share stories with audiences.
"It was really important that it wasn't one organisation or one person running it; that it was very much a collective endeavour," Claire Hicks, CEO of Writers SA, says.
Writer and chair of the Australian Society of Authors Jennifer Mills says Constellations couldn't have come together any other way: "It just isn't efficient or possible to put all that burden on one person or group, and we had no budget."
Five weeks later, Abdel-Fattah and Adler featured in conversation at Constellations, talking to a sold-out crowd on Sunday night about the issue of censorship and the author's 2025 novel Discipline.
Adler and Abdel-Fattah at Constellations at Adelaide Town Hall on Sunday night. (ABC News)
They were among more than 100 authors on a program of more than 50 events, including authors like Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis and award-winning Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann.
ABC Arts invited some of the organisers to share how the festival came together, its unexpected outcomes, and what they hope we can learn from both the collapse of AWW and the success of Constellations.
Writers' week collapses
Wyld is unflinching in her description of the Adelaide Festival board's cancellation of Abdel-Fattah.
"It was clearly a blatant act of anti-Palestinian racism," she says.
"This isn't about freedom of speech. We need to expect our institutions, our writers' festivals, to not be racist."
Organisations involved in pulling together Constellations, meanwhile, spoke about the role of writers' festivals in public discourse.
Writers SA, the advocacy body for South Australian writers and writing, was one of the first organisations to withdraw after Abdel-Fattah's axing from AWW.
Before it released its statement, it reached out to writers who had been scheduled to appear on its panels as part of the festival and found they mostly agreed with its position.
The statement read "silenc[ing] Randa undermines the purpose of writing and of writers festival".
That same day, Pink Shorts Press shared its own statement saying it and its authors had unanimously agreed to withdraw from the festival.
"It is truly heartbreaking to watch the Adelaide Festival board destroy this cultural institution," it wrote
"Open and challenging discourse within the arts is more vital than ever, and something we all need to fight for."
Speaking to ABC Arts, Hart describes AWW as "an important festival on a national scale". It is the largest literary event in Australia, welcoming 160,000 attendees in 2025.
"It seems clear that our state government totally didn't get that and just sees it as like a footnote on the rest of the [Adelaide] festival programming," she says.
She also sees the collapse of AWW as part of a concerning trend of the silencing of pro-Palestine voices in the arts.
She points to the Queensland government revoking Wyld's $15,000 fellowship from the State Library of Queensland last year, over comments she made about the war in Gaza on social media.
"That made it feel all the more important to do something about [AWW]," Hart says. "But all the more disheartening to see that there's no sense of learning within the arts establishment."
Gavin Williams, co-owner of Matilda Bookshop in the Adelaide Hills, and president of the body representing booksellers, BookPeople, says he and his staff are "devastated" by the loss of AWW this year.
"It's hugely important for us as booksellers," he says.
"You go to writers' festivals and hear books and authors and thoughts and ideas you might not get exposed to otherwise."
Mike Ladd, who curated poetry at both writers' week and Constellations, says it was "painful" to lose six months of work putting together a day-long poetry event for AWW, including organising for poets from the West Bank to attend.
"There was despair in the writing community and a lot of anger, and also in the reading community," he says. "People love this festival."
But he adds once the board disinvited Abdel-Fattah, AWW was "cooked", noting a trend of the community supporting artists who have been silenced, including the backlash to Creative Australia rescinding its invitation to Khaled Sabasbi to the Venice Biennale and the boycott of Bendigo Writers Festival.
Ladd explains that writers' festivals offer much-needed exposure to poets: "People buy poetry if they like what they've heard." (Supplied)
"You could see what happened over the Biennale, you could see what happened over Bendigo," he says. "[The cancellation of AWW] was absolutely going to happen.
"The writers all walked in solidarity. And to me, it's fighting back against power. Like, what can you do? You can withdraw your labour in protest."
Putting together a new festival
In the detritus of AWW, Constellations grew, with existing scheduled authors and new ones joining the event.
But the many people and groups behind Constellations knew they didn't want to replicate AWW director Louise Adler's intended program.
"The writers' week team were equally devastated [by its cancellation]," Hicks says. "It's almost a year's worth of work that just got pulled away.
"We wanted to be acknowledging and respectful of the work that whole team had done."
For Writers SA, the guiding principle behind its events at Constellations was a focus on South Australian writers.
The number of local writers participating increased compared to AWW, with many South Australian writers paired with international authors or offered the opportunity to moderate panels.
"I feel like lots of the local writing community haven't necessarily had a place in Adelaide Writers' Week for a while," Hart says.
"Lots of the authors we were working with may have been on their third book but had never been invited to an Adelaide Writers' Week before."
That focus on South Australian writers flowed through to Rivers of Reason, an afternoon of talks between Aboriginal and Arab writers.
When Wyld was setting up the event, an anonymous source offered a large donation. It "reaffirmed" what she was planning.
Chelsea Watego, Irene Watson and Dominic Guerrera at Rivers of Reason: Blak & Arab Writers in Conversation. (Supplied: Sia Duff)
It was a continuation of the kind of programming Wyld had appeared in before, where at Writers' Week in 2023, she joined Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa and Wiradjuri and Gamilaroi writer and broadcaster Lorna Munro on a panel.
"The pairing of Aboriginal and Palestinian academics and writers was just amazing," she says. "The conversations that came out and the synergy and people talking about connections and history was really powerful.
"These conversations have been occurring right back into the 1980s. This is not new."
Broadening the festival
One of the silver linings of the fallout from AWW is the "more inclusive set of curatorial voices" involved in Constellations, like Wyld's, Hicks says.
The broadening of the program included a greater focus on genre fiction, children's literature, poetry and First Nations writers.
Author and editor Bethany Clark programmed a day at Constellations focused on writing for children and young people, featuring Maxine Beneba Clarke, Sara Haddad and more.
"If I'd had more than a day, I would have had a whole festival," she says.
Her events were a response to being told children's programming "wasn't a priority" for Constellations.
Maxine Beneba Clarke featured in both the poetry and the children's literature programs at Constellations. (Supplied: Sia Duff)
"It wasn't really part of the conversation, and I wanted it to be," she says.
"Everybody understands how important reading to children is. Yet children's literature is forgotten, overlooked, and isn't given the importance that it should have."
Wyld suggests some of the mistakes of more traditional writers' festivals were still repeated at the new event.
"There's a few sessions that didn't invite Aboriginal people to their panels," she says.
"There were choices being made that replicate what's been happening for decades in Australia, in every festival."
She points specifically to a panel about settler colonialism, featuring UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese. She says she and others advocated for an Aboriginal speaker to be added to the panel.
"On the other hand, we have had other event organisers stepping outside of their comfort zone and programming people that needed to be part of the conversation, instead of all just being white writers on every panel," she says.
Constellations also extended into new venues beyond the Adelaide CBD, into the suburbs and regions like Port Augusta and the Adelaide Hills.
"Having events be physically accessible to more people makes a big difference," Hart says.
These new settings also facilitated creative programming choices, like a writers' group who paired a poetry reading with their morning swim at Port Elliot.
Backlash and community support
Writers SA, Pink Shorts Press and others have been bombarded with emails, which they say seem to be written by AI, admonishing them and the festival.
Mills encourages people who object to Constellations — which she says deliberately amplifies Palestinian and First Nations voices — to put on their own event.
"We live in a democracy, people can hold public talks, and that's a wonderful thing," she says.
Speaking the day before the festival opened, Mills said: "I will look back at this and be very proud of it, but at the moment I'm somewhere between bemused and exhausted." (ABC News: Daniel Taylor)
But for Wyld, the backlash has been more targeted. She says there has been a campaign to scupper her career since the beginning of the war in Gaza, including a new effort to have her next book contract cancelled.
"There's elements of the media that just want me to disappear and they'll continually attack me," she says.
"I knew when I put my hand up to organise Rivers of Reason that this would happen.
"But I did it anyway, because they're not going to frighten me into just disappearing.
"The personal attacks on me are nothing compared to what Randa [Abdel-Fattah] has experienced, or Palestinians in general. But it came at a cost."
Courtney Jaye, Daniel Nour and Micaela Sahhar at Rivers of Reason: Blak & Arab Writers in Conversation. (Supplied: Sia Duff)
Aside from that backlash, Constellations has been received with overwhelming positivity.
"People thank you when they arrive [at an event], and they thank you when they leave," Hicks says.
"[They say] 'This is amazing', 'We're so glad this happened', 'We're so grateful that this is going on'."
And donations flowed in so quickly from sponsors and individuals Constellations has been able to pay its speakers at Australian Society of Authors rates (the recommended payment for a panel appearance is $257).
"It proves a point," Mills says. "It is possible to pay writers and have a festival."
Not writers' week
The people ABC Arts spoke to stress they're not interested in replacing Adelaide Writers' Week permanently.
In fact, having now been part of a volunteer effort to stage a writers' festival, Hart says AWW — which has a staff of just one director and one program manager — needs more resources.
"It takes so much work and so many people to put together a writers' festival," she says.
But organisers reckon there are lessons to be learned in the opportunities of "bottom-up", inclusive programming and extending festivals beyond city hubs, including attracting a more diverse audience.
"The demographic often swings in a certain way — it's a lot of older women," Hart explains.
She was heartened to see so many young people at, for example, Rivers of Reason on Monday.
"It just showed the kind of programming that young people are interested in — and it's political," she says.
For Mills, the lesson to take from Constellations is a political one: "not to underestimate writers".
"Writers are workers," she says. "We are the backbone of literature.
"Without the writers you don't have a festival, and you need to show respect to that, not just by paying us fairly, but by protecting our rights at work, including our right to freedom of expression."