Cancel culture at Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week is not welcome here | Sam Shahin

Today’s dangerous narrative seems to have shifted to “we disagree with you, so therefore you must be a bad person”, writes Sam Shahin.

Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa. Photo by Rob Stothard/Getty Images.

I read with much despair of the criticism of Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week.

We are a better society than that.

I must admit that I have not historically been a mad follower of Writers’ Week. I wasn’t gifted the literary gene.

This year’s program did attract my attention though for many reasons.

The first is the choice of director: Louise Adler is a prominent Australian publisher (previous CEO of Melbourne University Publishing), an academic (Deputy Chancellor of Monash University), an ABC Radio presenter, a newspaper Editor (The Age), and has directed the Melbourne International Arts Festival among many other accolades, too long to list. She is married to Max Gillies.

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She knows her stuff.

It was a coup for our State to have her accept a three-year appointment as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week. It is a testament to the event that it can attract such wonderful talent.

Writers Week has long established itself as a world acclaimed melting pot of intellectual and literary views where people contest ideas. It exemplifies diversity. It shapes our views. It makes us better.

Palestinian activist, poet, and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd.

Societies grow wiser when we can listen and contest ideas without the impulse to denounce what we do not agree with.

Over the last decade, we have dangerously shifted in the ‘way we disagree’ with the views of others. We used to say: “we disagree with you, so you are wrong”. Today’s dangerous narrative seems to have shifted to “we disagree with you, so therefore you must be a bad person”.

To this end, the criticism thrown at the event and Adler is grossly unjustified and at best, narrow minded. I believe that we should respect Adler’s stewardship and judgment. The Premier has made a good call supporting the event and resisting the diatribe thrown at the event and its organisers.

The 160 writers gracing our State for the event represent 50 companies from 17 countries. They will provide for one of the most critical intellectual weeks in our State. It is a literary festival. Some of the guests make the who’s who of international thinkers such as none other than Esther Freud, the granddaughter of Sigmund Freud himself!

“It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it,” said Aristotle. Let’s keep an open mind. We’ll be a better State for it.

Dr Sam Shahin is executive director at Peregrine Corporation and managing director of The Bend Motorsport Park.

The views in this column are Dr Sam Shahin’s, and do not represent anyone else’s, nor those of his company.