#adelaide-writers-week

#adelaide-writers-week

The third Wednesday or Thursday evening of each month, comic book shop Books with Pictures ( 1401 SE Division St) hosts this open-invite book club devoted to a wide variety of graphic novels-from the Bitter Root series, about a family of sympathetic monster hunters during the Harlem Renaissance, to an illustrated retelling of the 1872 queer vampire murder mystery Carmilla. Sometimes artists and writers join to talk about their latest work.

[We] reiterate this is not about identity or dissent but rather a continuing rapid shift in the national discourse around the breadth of freedom of expression in our nation following Australia's worst terror attack in history, it added. As a board we took this action out of respect for a community experiencing the pain from a devastating event. Instead, this decision has created more division and for that we express our sincere apologies, the board wrote in its statement on Tuesday.

This December, I was on the inaugural United flight from San Francisco International Airport (SFO) to Adelaide Airport (ADL), the first-ever direct flight connecting the U.S. and South Australia. The nearly 16-hour flight will be happening three days a week with United Economy, Premium Plus, and Polaris business-class seats available, making it easier than ever to reach this part of Australia.

It was the first Wednesday of December and the last One-Page Wednesday of 2025. Hosted by Portland novelist Emme Lund (The Boy with a Bird in His Chest) at the Literary Arts bookstore, the free monthly event is an open mic that functions more like a public writers' group. Students, aspiring writers, and National Book Award-winning authors hang out and read aloud one page from a work in progress.

Sounding amused, publisher Pramod Kapoor recalls the reaction of the Indian cricketing legend Bishen Singh Bedi when he learned Kapoor was printing 3,000 copies of his autobiography. Only 3,000? he protested. I fill stadiums with 50-60,000 people coming to see me play and you think that's all my book is going to sell? Kapoor, the founder of Roli Books, explains that Bedi's legions of admirers were unlikely to translate into book buyers. That was in 2021.

Organizers canceled the 2026 Adelaide Writers' Week festival on Tuesday, after some 180 international and Australian authors withdrew from the event in protest of the scrapping of an appearance by an Australian-Palestinian author and academic. The event's director Louise Adler, the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, said she was quitting her role on Tuesday, shortly before the festival was called off altogether.

To be clear: the Bondi attack was horrific. It has left people shaken, grieving and afraid, particularly in communities already living with heightened vulnerability. That fear is real and it deserves empathy and compassion, and the board may well have believed it was acting in good faith. But fear also has a way of reducing our moral and intellectual horizons.