At 15, Llewellyn attended Miss Mann’s Business School in Adelaide, where she learned to type; she later trained as a nurse at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, where she met her husband, Richard (he was a patient in an iron lung, having contracted polio). They had two children, including writer and artistic director Caro Llewellyn, who has championed Salman Rushdie’s right to speak.
An avid reader, Llewellyn started to write her own poems while at university, and while she missed the first Adelaide Writers Festival because she was pregnant, she vividly recalls the second being opened by celebrated Perth writer Thomas Hungerford in 1961.
“He was interrupted all through his speech by Hal Porter, who was drunk,” she says. “It was electrifying.”
The event was initially designed for writers but members of the public soon outnumbered them. Guests in the early days include John Updike, Nancy Cato, and Rose Tremain and Richard Holmes, who met there and later married.
“Over the years, everyone came,” Llewellyn says. “I saw Ted Hughes lying on the ground like a lion.” (Hughes attended in 1976, where he faced protests from feminists enraged by the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath.)
The festival grew so rapidly they had to abandon the State Library for the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens. Immediately it became more visible, free and egalitarian, and readers came to hear writers from all over the world. “Now it’s gone, and people who loved it are shattered, and
I cannot forgive her (Adler),” says Llewellyn. “I don’t think anyone can. To turn it into a festival of politics, and then to see her just walk away.”Llewellyn says she was “concerned and puzzled” by Adler’s programming from the beginning.
“In her first program, in 2023, she had all these political speakers from one side, and it bothered me,” she says. "Instead of writers standing up to talk about why they wrote the book and how they had the idea and what was the aim of it, it became a thing about politics. Literature faded away. Some of the greatest events they had were with poets. People would sit on the lawn, all the way back to the street; you could hear a pin drop.
“People befriended Louise when she came to take it over, and hospitality is old-fashioned in SA. It is warm, and beautiful, and she had it all. And she ruined the festival, and turned on her heel and walked out. “One friend said to me ‘If I’d known the truth (about the efforts by Abdel-Fattah to cancel Jewish writer Thomas Friedman before she was herself cancelled), I would never have joined the boycott’. The hypocrisy – it’s shameful.
“In my view, Louise should hang her head. She should never go to Adelaide again. I am speaking for myself but I know others who are very hurt. “I want them all to know: what you have done is wicked, and to do it so idly, so casually, to something so precious … what else could I do but write a poem?
Adelaide Writers’ Week
We gave you our
child,
handed it over,
hearts in our mouths
and we waited.
Soon you removed the blanket,
the baby shivered, but few noticed
(though any decent parent would have.)
The child wasn’t well. You had decided
vegan food was what you wanted for it.
Tears and loss of weight
were the result. Only a few noticed,
wringing their hands and muttering
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to each other. Nobody likes a whinger,
and who knows when they’d need your approval.
I was one of the latter.
Later more noticed
how sickly t our he baby had become.
Bored, it was then you took a gun
and shot
precious child,
our precious child.
How quickly we turned on each other
with glaring looks, turned backs
and sorrow. We left you to walk away
wearing the halo you had put on your head.
— Kate Llewellyn
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AU Adelaide Writers Week Festival cancelled (Read 3110 times)
