Cory Doctorow, Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina, Peter Beinart, Glenn Loury and Maria Ressa will join Salman Rushdie at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas this August.
Presented by The Ethics Centre, the Festival’s 13th program includes a newly extended 10 days of talks, world-premiere art, taboo film and behind-the-scenes excursions. With the main Festival weekend (22-23 August) at Carriageworks, Sydney, the Festival extends across more venues than ever before, including Sydney Town Hall and major cultural institutions.
Introducing the 2026 program, Festival Director, Danielle Harvey, said: ‘We live in a world changing faster than our ability to make sense of it – one of overlapping crises, competing truths and profound uncertainty. The Festival of Dangerous Ideas is not interested in outrage for its own sake, or in voices that are shocking or mere opinion.
‘What we seek is something rarer and, we believe, more valuable: the opportunity to sit with real complexity, to encounter ideas that resist easy answers and to confront the forces shaping our world that too often remain hidden in plain sight.’
Previously announced, Salman Rushdie returns to Australia for the first time since the 2022 attack that profoundly reshaped his life and work, and 12 years after his last Festival appearance.
Presenting the opening night, Rushdie’s keynote The Price of Ideas will explore censorship, identity, belief and the dangerous power of words. He will reflect on the violent reactions that ideas can provoke and the personal cost of defending free expression.
Festival of Dangerous Ideas: international speakers
- John Cameron Mitchell. The Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator and queer icon will present a ferocious, funny and unfiltered masterclass on ‘punk as action’, refusal and collective courage.
- Maria Alyokhina. The artist and activist of internationally-renowned feminist-art-punk group Pussy Riot will perform a work drawn from her recently-released memoir, Political Girl, with Eric J Breitenbach.
- Hanno Sauer. Best-selling German-Dutch philosopher Hanno Sauer’s recent book, The Invention of Good and Evil, examines the evolution of morality and why understanding ethics through history may be key to navigating today’s fractured world. In a talk entitled After Equality, he will challenge the idea that a truly classless society is possible by tracing how status, privilege and hierarchy persist across history.
- Maria Ressa. The Filipino-American journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate is the co-founder and CEO of Rappler, the top digital-only news site fighting for press freedom in the Philippines. She examines how disinformation, fear and outrage have become weapons against democracy.
- Glenn Loury. As one of America’s most outspoken intellectuals, Glenn Loury explores the subtle forces that shape what can and cannot be said.
- Peter Beinart. The influential political columnist and journalist for The New York Times and MSNBC will explore how the war in Gaza is reshaping Jewish identity and challenging liberal values.
- Ussama Makdisi. The Palestinian-American historian challenges one of the West’s most persistent assumptions about the Middle East, tracing histories of pluralism, coexistence and shared political life. In doing so, he reveals that the region’s fractures are not ancient inevitabilities, but the modern legacies of empire and occupation.
- Jesse Bering. The American psychologist revisits the controversial work of psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, whose decades-long research into reincarnation, apparitions and near-death experiences challenged scientific orthodoxy.
- Joanna Bourke. The acclaimed British historian will explore the assumptions and stories we tell about female violence, human nature, cruelty, desire, and power. In doing so, Professor Bourke will reveal how fear and fascination have shaped the way societies define good and evil.
- Anke Richter. The New Zealand-based, German investigative journalist and Cult Trip author appears across two Festival sessions exploring how dangerous ideas take hold. In the panel Trust Me, It’s a Conspiracy, Richter joins a panel of sharp minds to examine the line between paranoia and legitimate suspicion, Richter joins Australian Cult Survivors Network founding member, Laura McConnell, and Sarah Steel in How to Start a Cult.
- Philippe Bolopion. The Human Rights Watch Executive Director asks what happens when the institutions designed to protect human dignity come under strain. His session examines human rights ‘hotspots’ across the world.
- Alexandre Lefebvre. The philosopher joins Hong Kong and Taiwanese American journalist Melissa Chan and Palestinian-American historian Ussama Makdisi to examine what people find attractive in authoritarian regimes. What do they ‘get right’ in comparison with the messiness of liberal democracies?
Festival of Dangerous Ideas: Australian speakers
Leading Australian voices taking to the stage include author and former Prime Ministerial speechwriter Lucinda Holdforth, who draws on her latest book to examine the social, economic and political costs of longer lives and ageing populations.
Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Foreign Minister Bob Carr, and former officer in the Australian Army and Royal Australian Air Force Catherine McGregor will explore what it means to be sovereign country in a dangerous world.
Special Envoy Aftab Malik will invite audiences to radically reframe their understanding of Islam, moving beyond fear and distortion to consider its civilisational legacy, its critique of the West and the resources it offers in support of Western civilisation.
And Stan Grant joins Jess Hill and Peter Singer in a roundup of provocative thinkers who have been asked to diagnose society’s ills and prescribe the cure.
Award-winning writer Richard Flanagan will present a new essay written exclusively for the Festival, arguing that writers have a vital role to perform in an age of conformity, fear and intellectual retreat.
Author and public intellectual Clive Hamilton traces how a world shaped by nationalist rivalry and authoritarian worldviews is undermining global climate action, asking whether humanity can still summon the collective will to survive.
Across the Festival’s opening weekend, panels and conversations will bring keynote speakers together with leading Australian and international thinkers and changemakers for more urgent, expansive discussions on the ideas shaping public life.
The Festival is presented by The Ethics Centre, a not-for-profit that encourages people to examine all aspects of life. FODI is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW and Destination NSW and its returning principal partner is JobLink Plus.
