Council funding for alternative Writers’ Week ‘on a knife’s edge’
The Adelaide City Council will tonight hear a motion to fund an alternative Writers’ Week, with the vote expected be close.
A special council meeting will be held tonight to discuss a motion to fund a guerrilla Writers’ Week following the cancellation of the 2026 edition of Adelaide Writers’ Week.
Adelaide councillor Keiran Snape’s motion calls for the City of Adelaide to “immediately enter into discussions with the not for profit Writers SA to assist the organisation to curate and manage an alternative event in February/March 2026 featuring participants who have been prepared to participate in the cancelled event”.
Snape’s motion will be debated tonight at Adelaide Town Hall and asks for the City of Adelaide to put $250,000 towards the event, as well as to “make available to the alternative event any available venue such as the Town Hall, any Council owned or controlled building and public space, including the Park Lands”.
Asked whether he thought tonight’s motion would succeed, Snape – who is running as an independent candidate for Adelaide at the state election – said “it’s on a knife’s edge”.
He believed that five councillors would support the motion, saying that he was “going to make a strong argument”.
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“I believe Writers’ SA and others will be making strong, positive arguments and a business case for this as well,” he said.
He previously told InDaily that “the loss of Writers’ Week is a deep blow not just to the culture of our city but also our local economy”.
“If this guerilla event can help stem some of that bleeding, then it’s incumbent on us to try,” he said.
Snape told InDaily on Monday that he was seeking funding and venue support for the event.
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“I think it’s important to do that because we’ve now got a bit of cultural gulf in the city for what would have been Writers’ Week,” Snape said.
“A lot of local writers used Writers’ Week to show their wares and the material they’ve written, so the cancellation of Writers’ Week had a knock-on effect for our local creatives and local authors.”
Margot Lloyd and Emily Hart, who are co-founders of independent publisher Pink Short Press, previously told InDaily there had been “a lot of interest” from writers and stakeholders to organise a guerilla festival.
The potential guerilla festival comes after a majority of authors scheduled to participate in the official Adelaide Writers’ Week pulled out following the controversial decision to drop Palestinian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah.
Abdel-Fattah had been criticised for anti-Zionist views, including saying “Zionists have no right to cultural safety”.
She slammed the decision to remove her as a “blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism”.
The decision led to the resignation of Adelaide Writers’ Week director Louise Adler, the resignation of the Adelaide Writers’ Week board, the eventual cancellation of the festival and the appointment of a new board, which apologised to Abdel-Fattah.
It comes as an “avid book lover”, who asked not to be identified, has begun leaving books at the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden – where Adelaide Writers’ Week is held – as “an act of protest”, saying that she and her friends “are feeling such a loss for our community and for our city, for the week that we have bookmarked into our annual calendars, year after year, and look forward to for months in advance”.
