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Address on Cultural Appropriation Roils a Writers Festival

by Rod Nordland


BRISBANE, Australia |— Officials in charge of an Australian writers festival were so upset with the address by their keynote speaker, the American novelist Lionel Shriver, that they publicly disavowed her remarks.

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Links to her appearance were also temporarily unavailable on the festival website, leading supporters of Ms. Shriver to complain of censorship, but festival officials said it was only a technical malfunction on their website, which was repaired later.

The event, the Brisbane Writers Festival, which ended Sunday, also hurriedly organized counterprogramming, billed as a “right of reply” for critics of Ms. Shriver, whose speech belittled the movement against cultural appropriation. They scheduled the rebuttal opposite a session Saturday afternoon in which Ms. Shriver was promoting her new novel, “The Mandibles.”

Read on here (New York Times, September 12, 2016)

For Lionel Shriver’s speech click here (The Guardian, September 13, 2016).

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