Okay: last time I sent a newsletter I got a couple of emails back going, basically, who are you and why am I receiving this, and you know what, fair enough, it’s not like I’m a very regular correspondent. I’m Holly, I’m a writer and game designer, I wrote a book called The Husbands, and I promise you’re receiving this because you signed up for it but it definitely might have been a while ago.

ADELAIDE WRITERS’ WEEK

ANYWAY. I live in London but Adelaide is my home town, and as you may have heard, its big literary festival — Adelaide Writers’ Week — had a bit of an implosion over the course of the last ten days or so.  If you haven’t heard about it — I know half this newsletter’s readers are people I know from games rather than books — basically what happened was: 

1. On Thursday 8^th January, the board of the Adelaide Festival (a wider arts festival which Adelaide Writers’ Week sits within) put out a statement saying they had uninvited the writer Randa Abdel-Fattah because they felt her presence would not be “culturally sensitive” “so soon after Bondi”.

2. They also said they would be putting in place a subcommittee to oversee curatorial decisions for Adelaide Writers’ Week in the future.

3. The disinvitation seemed to have been sent out in direct contradiction of the wishes of Louise Adler, the widely beloved director of Adelaide Writers’ Week.

4. To have directorial decisions overruled by the board — which at that time included no artists, writers, publishers, curators or indeed anybody with any professional involvement in the arts at all — seemed obviously bad.

5. On top of which there were rumours that the board decision was the result of political pressure from the Premier of South Australia (the news since then suggests those rumours were pretty spot on).

6. Over the course of that day, a whole bunch of writers pulled out in protest.

7. More writers quit the next day.

8. Across the weekend, more writers kept quitting, and the board put out a statement saying, basically, “well this sucks but also we stand by our decision”, but half of the board then quit so they obviously weren’t standing by it particularly hard.

9. And in fact shortly after that the rest of the board cancelled the event entirely, and also quit.

10. Also, Louise Adler quit.

11. By Tuesday a new board was appointed. 

12. That board apologised to Randa Abdel-Fattah, and to Louise Adler, and said it was too late to fix things for the 2026 festival but that AWW would be back in 2027 and they would invite Abdel-Fattah to take part, and they would not be putting in place a subcommittee with curatorial oversight of AWW, and basically they agreed that the whole thing was a bit of a mess.

If you want to read more about this there’s a lot out there; Louise Adler’s article on her resignation, previous director Jo Dyer’s article, a lot of other options for opinions to try out, Ian Dunt on freedom of speech, Olivia De Zilva on her experience of being one of the withdrawing writers, Patrick Marlborough saying let it die, there was basically a week where you couldn’t turn around without hitting another AWW opinion. My own opinion is, yes, coming in a little late.

In general, the tone from most of the commentary I’ve seen has been well, that was a clusterfuck. And sure, no denying it. But I have a very specific feeling about this which is based on (1) growing up in Adelaide and then (2) being one of the writers who dropped out. And that feeling is: ideally the board would not have made its weird bad decision, but given that they did, I feel like everything after that went about as well as it could have? I feel like a bunch of people saw something bad happening, and acted in response, and then that bad thing stopped happening. And that that’s quite rare and precious.

Adelaide Writers’ Week was the first writers’ festival I ever knew about. It formed my ideal of what a writers’ festival can be. It gets a bunch of people along — last year, apparently it hit 160,000 — and it’s certainly important but also I just love it, it’s such a wonderful thing. Most of the events at AWW are free, and happen outdoors, in the parklands near the city centre. A little walk from the city library and the university in one direction and the train station in the other. It is so central and easy to get to. It is so straightforward to just wander along for an hour or two and see what’s happening. You can bring a sandwich from home or a pie from the shop in the station. You don’t have to buy their official vendor coffee, you don’t have to plan what you’re doing days in advance, you don’t have to feel confident or sure that you’re meant to be there, you can just go.

It’s a long-lived festival and it’s been through a lot of different eras, and look: its programming isn’t always totally for me. I would say in general, though certainly not always, it tends towards non-fiction over fiction, it tends towards discussing subject matter over form. It’s usually more interested in fairly mainstream literary fiction and perhaps crime than in other types of fiction (sff, romance, weird experimental stuff, YA, whatever). I don’t believe it’s ever scheduled a talk by a games writer. I’ve absolutely been to other writers’ festivals where there are more writers I already know and love, or more talks that make me think “ooooh yes” when I look through the programme.

But I’ve never been to another festival that feels like AWW does. Where it is so straightforward to just drop by, to sit by the river, to look at parakeets or pelicans, to pop in after work or after you’ve been to the library, and to do all that for free. Where if you’re curious about something, you can just see what it’s like without making a commitment. Where it actually doesn’t matter whether you think oooh yes when you look through the programme because you don’t have to go “oh yeah that’s perfect for me”: the standard mode of taking part is to pick a day and wander along and try this stage or that stage, discover something that you didn’t even know you were interested in.

Part two of my very specific feeling about this whole situation is: this year I was going to be appearing at AWW, on one of a couple of panels curated by Pink Shorts Press. (The panels hadn’t been announced at the time of all the kerfuffle; there’s usually another tranche of AWW announcements at the end of January, which is how more writers withdrew from the festival than were actually listed on the programme.) And — I mean, of course it’s magical to think of speaking at the writers’ festival that you went to as a strange awkward teenager, the place where you saw actual writers just being people. Of course I was so excited.

This was true for a lot of the other people on the Pink Shorts panels as well; I think most of us were South Australians. When Pink Shorts emailed around that Thursday to let us know what was going on, everyone said some version of well that seems fucked up, I’m out, but of course we were all sad about it. (It was definitely worse for some of my co-panelists than for me — I’ve already had a bunch of chances to talk about my book, but as Olivia’s article discusses, there aren’t that many chances to bring attention to a small-press Adelaide-published debut.)

So that all sucked. But here’s what I thought was going to happen, when that Thursday email went around.

• maybe a third of the writers at the festival would withdraw

• Louise Adler would probably resign…

• …but a depleted festival would go ahead

• and someone else would be appointed to direct it; someone who would do as they were told by the board re: any controversial invitations and who didn’t object to working under a vaguely-appointed oversight committee 

• something special and good would be worse 

Instead, a hundred and eighty writers withdrew. And a couple of people from the main festival dropped out as well, and more threatened to. And then AWW was cancelled for the year, and a new board was appointed, with some people on it who seem really good and who have actually worked in the arts before and who immediately apologised, to Adler and to Abdel-Fattah, and who called off the oversight committee. And — look, I don’t know who the new director is going to be, I don’t know what the 2027’s festival is going to be like, maybe this time next year I’ll be going well that turned out terrible, but at the moment that feels hopeful to me. Of course it sucks that the festival is off for this year, it sucks that Louise Adler was forced out, but given how this whole thing was going, given the original board decision, given how untenable that makes any director’s position and how deeply it would have damaged the festival, “a hundred and eighty writers withdraw their labour” and “actually, some of the participants in the main festival also threaten to withdraw” and “the entire board leaves in embarrassed chaos” and “a new board comes in who realise what a fuckup it all was and who seem to be quite cross about it all” is a good outcome, right?

Which I’m not used to! It’s not normally how it goes! Normally you, what, switch away from Spotify to another service that’s a little worse to use but a little less morally bankrupt, and Spotify doesn’t care, it just finds new ways to be evil. Or you download an app to see whether your groceries have unsustainably-sourced palm oil in them, and that’s great, but the sun bears keep losing their homes. You set up a monthly donation or write to your MP or sign a petition or go to a protest or avoid that TV show or this platform or the other service, you skip that thing you were excited to go to but which is now on the other side of a picket line, you turn down that piece of work you wanted to do, and none of this is hard exactly but god, it’s tiring, isn’t it? You do some things “wrong” and some things “right” and the impact on the world seems about the same. Why do I catch Ubers sometimes, but I won’t just put this newsletter on Substack, where more people would read it? Why do I only buy free-range meat, except pancetta? I don’t know! Is Nestlé still bad? I just looked it up and: yes, Nestlé is still bad! But there’s been a Nestlé boycott on since before I was born. I’m sure it would be worse if there hadn’t been, it does sound like the waves of boycott made a difference, but god, there must be someone in the world who was a kid in the 70s and started skipping kit-kats then and they’ve been doing it for fifty years and they’re still hearing about new Nestlé bullshit.

So I withdrew from Adelaide Writers’ Week with that sense of sad exhaustion, no, I don’t want to be a part of that. And then: something actually changed. And I feel astonished and grateful to have been part of a group of people who all said “oh wait no, that’s fucked up”, and who declined to take part in the fucked up thing, and where that made an immediate, dramatic difference.

May we all have a little treat like this: a moment of collective action where we do something because we know we ought to, and then we get to see it make a situation a bit less fucked up than it could have been.

THINGS I’VE ENJOYED LATELY

OKAY. Oof. Anyway, here’s some things I’ve enjoyed lately:

Game Poems (free, runs in browser) is a collection of short, expressive games, beautifully presented in a way that feels very browsable and satisfying to poke around at.

The Howardena Pindell exhibition at the White Cube was great — now closed unfortunately, but a bunch of paintings where they felt very different from different distances, where the physical experience of moving through the gallery and thinking “how do I feel about it from here, or from here” was very present — really taking advantage of the very big empty White Cube rooms.

Time Flies (£12 usually but on sale for another few hours as I send this), by Playables, Michael Frei and Raphaël Munoz. A game that plays out over a couple of hours where you control a fly, trying to tick to-do items off a bucket list. Super charming, hand-drawn animation, and it’s a great game to play with someone else and take turns — each fly only lives for maybe a minute and a half tops so you can pass the controller around quickly.

Sarah Moss’s novella Ghost Wall was so good — a story about a family who join a bunch of university students for a month of “experiential archaeology”, trying to live like they’re in the Iron Age. Wonderful book, incredible on sunlight and pebbles and watchfulness and noises and stress and bodies.

Right, speak soon, less intensely next time I hope,
Holly