Tensions over the war in Gaza have surrounded Australia’s writers festivals this year.

The deputy chair of Melbourne Writers Festival’s board, Leslie Reti, has resigned over a poetry session curated by Koori-Lebanese writer Mykaela Saunders, which brings together Aboriginal and Palestinian poets. He deemed a line of promotional copy “historically inaccurate and deeply offensive”. It reads: “Aboriginal and Palestinian solidarity has a long history, a relationship that is more vital than ever in the movement to resist colonialism and speak out against atrocities.”

There was a petition against Jewish singer-songwriter Deborah Conway’s inclusion in the opening night of last week’s Perth Writers Weekend, due to her Radio National interview last year in which she questioned whether Palestinian children killed by the Israeli Defence Forces really counted as kids, describing them instead as “16-, 17-year-old young boys toting rifles”.

And there have been calls to cancel pro-Palestinian feminist writer Clementine Ford’s appearances at Adelaide Writers Week, which starts this weekend, and the Sydney Opera House’s All About Women talks the following weekend, due to her involvement in the leak of the WhatsApp group of roughly 600 Jewish writers, artists and academics. The complainants against Ford have also questioned the appropriateness of her role as a co-curator of All About Women, for which she has programmed three events.

Louise Adler, director of Adelaide Writers Week, called Ford’s social media behaviour “immaterial” to her festival appearance, given that Ford’s event is about her anti-marriage book, rather than the war. Adelaide Writers Week has also, for the second year in a row, received complaints about its programming on Israel-Palestine. But Adler, a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors who is critical of Israel, pointed out to the Adelaide Advertiser that just five writers on the 2024 program will discuss the Middle East. Three of those writers are Israeli or live in Israel.

Denis Muller, senior research fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, has considered this constellation of writers festival controversies. He reminds us of the role writers festivals play as forums for considered public debate – and as antidotes to “the intolerant views and emotive habits of social media”. He reflects on the separate issues at play in each controversy.

He offers his own ideas, too, for how festivals might deal with controversies. None of them have changed their programming. But Muller suggests they could contribute further to public debate by arranging to have controversial words and actions by their writers challenged within festival events. As a former festival programmer myself, I can see how this could be tricky to implement. But I’m also intrigued by the possibilities.

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