Australian-Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fattah, who was axed from Adelaide Writers' Week in a decision that led to its cancellation, has been invited to next year's event as the new board seeks to repair reputational damage.
Adelaide Festival Board, now led by new faces after all previous members and the chair resigned, has retracted a statement from January 8, which announced Abdel-Fattah had been dumped from the program due to cultural sensitivities in light of the Bondi attack.
The board has reversed the decision and said it would reinstate her invitation to speak next year.
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"We apologise to Dr Abdel-Fattah unreservedly for the harm the Adelaide Festival Corporation has caused her," the board said in a statement today.
The board acknowledged that intellectual and artistic freedom was a "powerful human right".
"Our goal is to uphold it, and in this instance Adelaide Festival Corporation fell well short," the board said.
The board is now run by chair Judy Potter and members Rob Brookman, Jane Doyle, John Irving and Adelaide Council representative Mary Couros.
In a separate statement, Potter also apologised to Adelaide Writers' Week's former director, Louise Adler, who resigned over the previous board's decision on January 8 to go over her head and cancel Abdel-Fattah's appearance.
More than 180 writers — including former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern and Booker Prize-shortlisted British author Zadie Smith — withdrew from the event in protest, and five senior members of Adelaide Writers' Week and the Adelaide Festival Board resigned.
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The Adelaide Writers' Week, a world-renowned event that draws in dozens of local and international writers and more than 160,000 attendees each year, crumbled in less than a week and was officially scrapped.
Abdel-Fattah has launched defamation proceedings against South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas over a statement he made about her, which she described as a "vicious personal assault".
"He made a public statement that suggested I am an extremist terrorist sympathiser and directly linked me to the Bondi atrocity," she said.
"It was defamatory, and it terrified me. Enough is enough. I am a human being, not a punching bag."
The comment she is referring to is one Malinauskas made at a press conference on Tuesday.
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Malinauskas, who wrote in support of the previous board's decision to remove her from the event, defended his comments and said his responsibility was to de-escalate tensions following the attack at Bondi.
"Every single thing that I've said throughout of this, I've tried to make sure I think through carefully," he told ABC.
"The position I've taken on this, I've got to examine my conscience and do what I believe is right."
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