‘Political animal’ honoured at SA Literary Awards
The verdict is in for the state’s top literary awards, where nominees included the author at the centre of Adelaide Writers’ Week 2026 implosion.
Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah did not take home a prize at last night’s SA Literary Awards, but her impact on this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week did not go unnoticed.
Multiple award winners referenced Abdel-Fattah in their acceptance speeches, including Non-Fiction Award winner Micaela Sahhar and Fiction Award winner Michelle de Kretser.
Abdel-Fattah was nominated for two top gongs, the Fiction prize, which went to de Kretser, and the Premier’s Award, which went to poet Eileen Chong for We Speak of Flowers.
Both Sahhar and de Kretser were among hundreds of authors who withdrew from the 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Week program after the former Adelaide Festival Board decision to uninvite Abdel-Fattah. The demolished literary festival was eventually cancelled.
A new board apologised to Abdel-Fattah, who will return to Adelaide for Writers’ Week 2027.
De Kretser, whose novel Theory & Practice set in 1980s Melbourne beat out Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline, said she could not “accept an award in Adelaide in 2026 without saluting the south Australian literary community”.
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“For their resourcefulness in organising the Constellations literary festival after the collapse of Writers Week and for the integrity and care they showed in their programming,” she said.
“I am also utterly in awe of the many new and emerging writers, many of them from South Australia, for whom a gig at Writers Week must have been a long-held dream and yet who walked away from the festival in support of Randa Abdel-Fattah.”
Micaela Sahhar won the Non-Fiction Award for Find Me at the Jaffa Gate, an encyclopaedia of a Palestinian family and her debut book.
Sahhar said the many people to thank for the honour are in her book’s acknowledgements; she is a “political animal and when someone gives me a podium I can do no other but make a political speech”.
“In each state where Find Me at the Jaffa Gate has been honoured with an award I’ve used the opportunity to highlight the shrinking political horizon we are faced with in this country,” she said.
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“South Australia has also exhibited a tendency towards repression, or in other words, what the inevitable Francesca Albanese has called “Israel’s brand of democracy”.
“I could use this time to talk about Premier Malinauskas, but why bother? The literary community has already had a referendum on his preference to exclude Palestinian voices when his attempts to silence one of us at Adelaide Writers Week led to the solidarity of the overwhelming majority of us.”
Sahhar said she was “especially grateful” because last night’s ceremony at the State Library of South Australia was the first her father and aunt could attend.
“I drafted this book during Melbourne’s pandemic lockdowns, calling my father each time I finished a chapter for what we called entries. What a journey that manuscript has been, Dad,” Sahhar said.
“The lives of both Dad and my aunt predate the state of Israel, and they are the living proof that what people are made to believe is natural and deeply entrenched is neither of those things.
“That is, in the words of Nelson Mandela, to say that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Eileen Chong, who took home the Premiers’ Award also expressed her “solidarity for the Palestinian people, in particular I grieve the Palestinian poets and writers that have lost their lives in decades of conflict and occupation”.
“It is somewhat of an inside joke that I’m the Glenn Close of Australian poetry, I have been writing poetry for 20 years and while my books have been shortlisted for awards, I have never won a prize,” Chong said.
“I have been on the other side of the judging process often enough to know it is a huge accomplishment to be shortlisted, let alone win.”
Chong said her poetry book We Speak of Flowers was “an intensely private book born out of grief and its strange circular processes; for it to be read at all is wonderful and for it to be appreciated in this way is incredible”.
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