I didn’t want to write this, but the courage to listen to different ideas is vanishing

After a week in which we lost Fairfax and the Brisbane Writers festival banned writers, we need more than ever places where we can listen and reflect on different perspectives.

• Richard Flanagan
• The Guardian

A writer, if they are doing their work properly, rubs against the grain of conventional thinking.

Writers are often outcasts, heretics and marginalised.

Once upon a time writers’ festivals celebrated them, and with them the values of intellectual freedom and freedom of debate.

Writing that mattered wasn’t seen as being about being reassured, comforted, deceived and…

Rather it was, as…

• I didn’t want…