In January, as the implosion of Adelaide writers’ week made headlines around Australia and the world, Rosemarie Milsom was watching closely.
The Adelaide festival board, which oversees AWW, had overridden the literary festival’s director, Louise Adler, and disinvited the Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah over past comments she’d made about Israel and Zionism. This decision resulted not in a quieter, less-controversial festival as the board members may have hoped, but a boycott by 200-odd writers, the resignation of Adler – followed by the whole board – a potential defamation lawsuit against the South Australian premier and the collapse of AWW.
It was not yet public knowledge then that, as the director of Newcastle writers festival, Milsom had also booked Abdel-Fattah, five months earlier. But Milsom had predicted this exact controversy could happen and had been preparing for months.
On Friday AWW announced that Milsom has been appointed the new director of AWW – a position she accepted with excitement and understandable caution. She is a frequent attender and admires AWW’s “wonderful” commitment to keeping sessions free: “I grew up in a single-parent family in Sydney and access to free arts events really shaped who I am … I’d be shocked if that changed.” She adds with a laugh: “I think if it did, there’d be much more substantial outrage than what happened this year!”
Back to that. Both Newcastle and Adelaide made the decision to invite Abdel-Fattah but only one imploded over it. So what went differently for Milsom?
In February, with the ashes of AWW still smouldering, the New South Wales Liberal MP Aileen MacDonald used state parliament to reveal that Milsom had also booked Abdel-Fattah, and questioned why the festival was getting $250,000 in state funding. The premier, Chris Minns, called the Newcastle festival “crazy” and “divisive” but said he would not intervene – by then perhaps mindful of the growing controversy surrounding his South Australian counterpart Peter Malinauskas’ decision to weigh in against the author to the Adelaide board.
Milsom, who built NWF from the ground up in 2013, stood her ground. She refused to put out generic press statements (“not worth the paper they’re written on”) and directly emailed every booked writer to promise no one would be dropped. She refused to comment on Minns’ “crazy” statement. And, crucially, as her inbox and DMs flooded with abuse, she reminded herself: none of it was really about her.
Milsom was born in Bosnia, into a Bosnian Muslim family, and lost family in the Bosnian genocide; as such, she has strong personal views on politics but also knows the value of objectivity in leadership, and the democratic function of literary festivals.
“Aileen MacDonald asked for our funding to be revoked and I remember thinking, come to Newcastle and say that,” she says. “Come here and talk to all the businesses, the hotels that are booked out, the hire car company that picks the writers up from the airport, the local caterer, the local printers, the musicians that play in the lunch breaks, the tech and sound company. All local. Thousands of dollars invested in this community, before you even get to the audience.
“I remember thinking, I dare Chris Minns to say that in Newcastle. There’s safety in being in Sydney and shooting arrows up the freeway.”
Despite – or perhaps because of – the controversy, audiences galvanised around NWF: this year it celebrated record attendance (a 27% increase on 2025) and there were no protests or boycotts. Milsom’s message to audiences is: “If you want to get sucked into a sensational media headline and buy into pressure from certain sections of the media or the community, that’s your choice. I will get on with my job.”
‘Arts organisations keep making the same mistake’
Milsom remembers when she first experienced pressure to disinvite writers due to their views on Israel and Gaza, back in 2024. “It was unprecedented,” she says. There was no plan in place for something that hadn’t happened before: “The level of emotion that people were feeling, the anger and frustration and hurt about what had happened on October 7 – justifiably so, it was horrific – had suddenly landed on us. And I could tell, if we were caught off guard, wouldn’t everybody be?”
Milsom credits her 20-year career as a journalist for helping her cope. “I’ve known that pressure to not cover something,” she says. “It’s not a pleasant feeling. You lose sleep. But, at the back of your mind, if you’re a good, decent journalist, you know there’s a bigger reason for you doing a story … Translate that to a writers’ festival – that’s curatorial independence.”
“You have to know why you do what you do. That can get lost when you’re in the midst of an email barrage, or getting terrible threatening DMs and the writers are copping it as well. You basically just want it to go away. And I can appreciate the easiest way for that to happen is to just get rid of the writer – but that is never going to be the solution.”
Some arts organisations, including Creative Australia and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, have cancelled performances and excluded artists whose works or views on the Israel-Palestine conflict have come under criticism. But Milsom says that never achieves what they hope: “I’m really disappointed they keep making the same mistake. If you think the only way to navigate it is to appease one particular group, that’s not a fair response. What happens when you’ve got five groups coming at you? Do you appease all five?”
She worries that the pressure may start shape decision-making at other festivals, where “they might go, I don’t want any Arab writers in the program, it’s just not worth the trouble”.
She credits the NWF board for backing her in the face of pressure over Abdel-Fattah. “When governance fails, you get what happened in Adelaide. If a board is weak and confused and scared and worried about what sponsors or government are going to say, they turn on you. Strong governance means you’re going to upset people. You will never please everybody. Your decision not to disinvite a writer will disappoint people. But you can move forward with have your integrity in place.”
But, she concedes, that doesn’t make it easy. “I have got to the point a few times with NWF where I’ve thought, I just can’t do it, I don’t want to do it, it’s all too hard,” she says. “I don’t envy anyone in this position. I’m just running a writers’ festival, I’m not running the country. I’m not making decisions about the federal budget, or whether we’re going to war …
“In some ways, it is so ludicrous … Everyone needs to take a step back and actually look at what writers’ festivals are, what we do and what’s at the core of it, which is literature. If you think it’s damaging for writers to be able to speak their mind, that is an alarming state of affairs.”
Adler was known for her vocal commitment to similar principles, and she was still overridden. Is Milsom confident she has the complete backing of the new Adelaide festival board?
“That was one of the first questions I asked, ‘Do you have true independence and policies in place?’ And they said yes,” she says. “If that other board had stayed, there is no way I would have applied. I don’t think many people would have, in all honesty. It could have led to the demise of AWW. That was the line that was drawn.”
So far only one writer is invited to AWW in 2027: Abdel-Fattah, who was invited in a gesture of apology by the new board. Milsom says she is yet to accept. “I appreciate people don’t agree with what she has said. But I still stand by the principle that she should be allowed to have those views and that shouldn’t affect her invitation to a writers’ festival.”
As for Malinauskas, who has been issued two concerns notices by lawyers representing Abdel-Fattah? “I look forward to meeting the premier – I really do,” Milsom says. “We’ll obviously have a professional relationship … I’m really excited about the next three years.”
It is her hope that when AWW comes around in 2027, everyone will simply be relieved it survived. “My sense of it is everyone will have moved on,” she says. “And if you’re still hand-wringing over what happened in 2026, then that’s really on you.”
Source:
www.theguardian.com
