Writers festival told ‘lies about crazed rant’

Lionel Shriver accuses the Brisbane Writers Festival of lying about her address on identity politics.

Author and Journalist Lionel Shriver at home in Brooklyn, New York. Picture: David Joshua-Ford.

American novelist Lionel Shriver has accused the Brisbane Writers Festival of lying about her 2016 address on identity politics, which made headlines around the world, and subjecting her to behaviour that has “more in common with big game hunting than with art’’.

More: Identity storm in a teacup became a tempest, writes Lionel Shriver

In a John Bonython lecture delivered in Sydney on Tuesday night, Shriver revealed that before the festival, she told organisers she “proposed to speak about identity politics in fiction”, and she “received wholehearted approval’’.

However, when her speech provoked a walkout and a Guardian article by Sudanese-Australian writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied, “festival administrators informed the press that I had spoken ‘beyond my gift’ and had no permission to address this topic’’.

Shriver said her speech — in which she said she hoped the concept of cultural appropriation was a “passing fad’’ — was “widely misreported’’.

“The festival’s lies about my having gone off on some crazed, unauthorised rant were propagated everywhere,’’ she added.

The author of the bestselling novel turned film We Need to Talk About Kevin said when her publisher sent festival administrators emails demonstrating they “had given the topic their blessing, we got back sorrow about my ‘hurt’ and ‘pain’. I wasn’t hurt or in pain. I was pissed off. And they’re lucky I’m not litigious. Advertising that I go rogue at the podium ­impugned my reputation.’’

In Tuesday’s lecture, presented by the Centre for Independent Studies, Shriver took aim at the growing, “selfish’’ taboo on cultural appropriation, and mocked Abdel-Magied, who “has dined out on her rude exit ever since’’ she walked out of Shriver’s speech.

Shriver said Abdel-Magied’s “indignant screed’’ about “how deeply hurt and offended she was by my talk … was so overwritten that it was actually funny’’.

After her Brisbane experience, the novelist “vowed that I’d never come back … What I encountered in Brisbane hewed to an ugly behavioural model that has more in common with big game hunting than with art.’’

The Brisbane Writers Festival was embroiled in further controversy last year when it dropped high-profile writers Bob Carr and Germaine Greer from its program.

The festival’s artistic director, Zoe Pollock, said in a statement that the event was now under new leadership. She said: “While I was not present in 2016 and can’t speak to the actions of the team at the time, I can confirm that current Brisbane Writers Festival’s leadership stands by its authors and their right to free speech.”

In her lecture, titled Creativity in the Age of Constraint, Shriver said despite the 2016 controversy, “my opposition to this hare-brained notion (cultural appropriation) has grown only more implacable’’. She said three years ago, the taboo was “brand new”. Now, she could cite “copious ­examples’’ of fiction writers who had been reprimanded for “helping themselves to what didn’t ­belong to them’’.

According to the novelist and columnist, today “any novel that challenges the trans activist movement or the 100 per cent socially and economically beneficial character of today’s mass immigration to the West will attract a Twitter mob and scathing reviews … Despite the maverick reputation of the ‘artist’, I live in a world of conformity.’’