Introducing 2025 Adelaide Writers' Week
Introducing 2025 Adelaide Writers' Week content
A Message from Louise Adler AM, Director
Words Matter
The literary critic John Carey once wrote that good literature “doesn’t tell you what the truth is, but rather makes you feel what it would be like to know it.”
A survey of contemporary literary preoccupations suggests that truth and the feelings we bring to reading are unsettling propositions. The writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry joining us at AWW25 are therefore, unsurprisingly, focused on discontent in ourselves as individuals, within families, and beyond to within communities and between nation states. Literature is also contending with the categories of sameness and difference that today provoke such fierce conflict and anxiety.
The 2025 Festival will take place in the aftermath of the US and UK elections and the forthcoming elections in Europe and Australia. Writers’ attention will necessarily turn to the role of language in a political landscape which appears, paradoxically, to be characterised by deepening divisions and at the same
time consensus among a political class committed to the status quo. That consensus is affirmed by an increasingly impoverished and compromised media, beset by a litany of woes: plummeting numbers of readers, a skeletal and increasingly inexperienced newsroom, and the consequences of ‘being on the drip’. And all the while the unregulated social media inflames, misinforms and fuels paranoia. AWW has long been able to host civil and generous conversations that inform, engage and inspire our audience. In these turbulent times, AWW25 will continue that tradition.
Find out more about some of the writers who will be joining us in 2025 on the Writers' Week page.
Adelaide Festival and Adelaide Writers’ Week acknowledge the rights of individuals to hold different and divergent views. Views held by our writers are not necessarily the views of the organisation. We respect freedom of speech and the respectful exchange of ideas. We will not tolerate any behaviour that is insulting, against the law, or racist in any form, and we have a zero-tolerance policy regarding racism towards our staff, artists, audiences, and the communities we serve. We will not permit commentary during our festival that is insulting or racist.