The director of Adelaide writers’ week, Louise Adler, has resigned after the board of the Adelaide festival announced it had dumped the Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the literary event.

“I cannot be party to silencing writers, so with a heavy heart I am resigning from my role as the director of the AWW,” said Adler, one of Australia’s most influential literary figures.

“Writers and writing matters, even when they are presenting ideas that discomfort and challenge us. We need writers now more than ever, as our media closes up, as our politicians grow daily more cowed by real power, as Australia grows more unjust and unequal.”

Adler announced her resignation in an opinion piece published in Guardian Australia on Tuesday. Since the board announced the cancellation of Abdel-Fattah’s appearance at the 2026 event, some 180 writers, commentators and academics have withdrawn, including the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, the bestselling author Zadie Smith, the Pulitzer prize-winning writer Percival Everett and one of Australia’s most decorated writers, Helen Garner.

Abdel-Fattah previously faced sustained criticism from the Coalition, some Jewish bodies and media outlets for controversial comments about Israel, including alleging that Zionists had “no claim or right to cultural safety”.

Adler was highly critical of the board she had been working with for the 2026 event, her fourth since being appointed director of AWW in 2022. At the weekend that board shrank by more than half, with four of its seven voting members, including the chair, Tracey Whiting, resigning.

“The Adelaide festival board’s decision – despite my strongest opposition – to disinvite … Abdel-Fattah from the Adelaide writers’ week weakens freedom of speech and is the harbinger of a less free nation where lobbying and political pressure determine who gets to speak and who doesn’t,” she wrote, going on to condemn the board’s justification of community cohesion as the reason behind its decision to axe Abdel-Fattah.

“This is a managerialist term intended to stop thinking,” she said. “One doesn’t have to be a student of history to know that art in the service of ‘social cohesion’ is propaganda.”

Adler also indicated that the decision was an example of a wider issue within Australian arts organisations, citing previous board decisions by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (the cancelling of a concert by the pianist Jayson Gillham), Creative Australia (the withdrawal and subsequent reinstatement of Khaled Sabsabi to the 2026 Venice Biennale), and the collapse of the Bendigo writers’ festival.

_{Sign up: AU Breaking News email}

The column echoes concerns raised by 17 prominent cultural figures – who have all held senior leadership roles at Adelaide festival – in a letter to the festival’s board on Saturday.

Signatories included nine past artistic directors of the festival: Jim Sharman, Anthony Steel, Rob Brookman, Robyn Archer, Peter Sellars, Stephen Page, Paul Grabowsky, David Sefton and Neil Armfield. The director Barrie Kosky, who led the festival in 1996, has sent a separate letter to the South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, and the arts minister, Andrea Michaels, demanding that Abdel-Fattah be reinstated to the writers’ week program.

The open letter condemned the board’s decision on Abdel-Fattah and challenged the SA government to appoint people with arts expertise to the board of one of Australia’s most internationally renowned cultural events.

“We note there are currently none,” the open letter said.

On Tuesday, Abdel-Fattah called Adler’s resignation “a tragedy”, telling ABC Radio Adelaide that Adler was “one of the most incredible directors and icons in Australia’s cultural history”.

“What we have now is Louise Adler, a Jewish woman, an anti-Zionist Jewish woman, who has had to resign and step down from this festival,” she said. “It really shows you that in this moment her identity as a Jewish woman has been erased and this is an attack on me as a Palestinian and Louise Adler as an anti-Zionist Jewish woman.”

Abdel-Fattah rejected any suggestion she had made antisemitic comments in the past. “I have never, ever called for Jews to be unsafe,” she said, adding: “Zionism is not a racial or religious identity, it is a political ideology.”

In 2023 Adler was criticised for programming multiple Palestinian writers at AWW but argued that all authors were invited based on their books, not their political opinions.

“People are free to deeply object,” she told Guardian Australia after AWW finished that year. “They don’t have to come. Or come, and you don’t need to agree with what people think.

“But people listened. These steadfast Adelaide audiences came out in their thousands and listened with courtesy and respect for the conversation. It should be something that lifts the spirits of all of us.”

At that 2023 event, Malinauskas admitted he had been under immense pressure to axe the funding for writers’ week but decided it would set a dangerous precedent if a government determined who was allowed to speak.

Adler pointed out in her resignation column that, in contrast to his 2023 position, the premier had publicly backed the decision to axe Abdel-Fattah. Malinauskas has denied he put any pressure on the festival board to withdraw the academic’s 2026 invitation.

A former publisher and the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, Adler has been a consistent defender of free speech, the right to criticise Israel and the right of Palestinians to speak freely, as other Australian arts leaders have wavered.

She is on the advisory committee of the Jewish Council of Australia. She is also a former editor of Australian Book Review, a former arts editor for the Age, a former presenter of ABC Radio National’s Arts Today program and a former president of the Australian Publishers Association. She has also worked as a publisher-at-large at Hachette and as the chief executive of Melbourne University Press.

Adler’s paternal grandfather was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her father joined the communist resistance in Paris aged 14, while her mother fled Nazi Germany with her parents in 1939, as their extended family was murdered by the Nazis.

Born in Melbourne, Adler studied in Israel, the UK and the US, where she was a postgraduate student of the Palestinian American academic Edward Said.

Speaking on the ABC’s 7.30 in 2023, Adler recalled being summoned to a private meeting with an Israeli ambassador in the 2000s after she reviewed Said’s memoirs and being ordered to “not air Israel’s dirty linen in public”.

“That was one of my early experiences of being told that we don’t talk about our criticism of Israel in the public sphere,” she said.

But, she said, her family’s history had inspired her stance on Palestine. “It is important and it is vital for us to not look away,” she said. “We all have a choice. The world looked away during the second world war and the Jews, six million of our people, were murdered in that looking away.

“And that it is incumbent upon humanity to look at what is happening in Gaza now and to say, ‘We will not accept this. We will say no, not in our name.’”