^{Cover Image: Journalist and human rights advocate Antoinette Lattouf. Image by Hugh Stewart.}

As the firestorm of her legal battle with the nation’s public broadcaster lit up news outlets in every city and threatened to engulf her career, journalist and human rights advocate Antoinette Lattouf found herself turning to the stories of other Australian women who had taken on the system.

Whadjuk Noongar woman Fanny Balbuk Yooreel, who tore down colonial fence palings and picketed Parliament House in the 1800s, protesting the theft of her land. Migrant women plaintiffs who fought the landmark Jobs for Women sex discrimination case at the Port Kembla steelworks in the 1980s. Adelaide’s Dr Janice Duffy, who took on tech giant Google in a legal battle, self-represented, and won – twice. Lattouf sought solace in their uneven victories and unexpected revolutions and, following her journalistic instinct, began cataloguing their stories as a “faultline of women’s progress”.

“Writing this was a tonic for me.” Lattouf said. “But it was also a way to document this moment in history, which was a pretty terrifying one, I have to say. What I came to realise, reading through archival newspapers all the way back to the 1800s, is the way women were smeared and attacked. This is a tale as old as time. Even women who were later revered – and had portraits hung in the National Museum, scholarships in their honour and lecture theatres named after them – were, in their time, spoken about either dismissively, superficially about their appearance, or as a threat that needed to be contained.”

Lattouf absolutely didn’t want to write a memoir. Rather, Women Who Win: Celebrating Courage, Conviction and Change uses her own story to spotlight the army she has assembled of Australian women who have remade the rules. “I knew that I had a lot of public interest – a lot of people knew my story – but what I wanted was to use people gravitating towards my story to then tell other women’s stories, because so many haven’t been told or are incredibly overlooked,” she said.

Antoinette Lattouf will join headline speakers at the 2026 Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival this month, in conversation with Jo Trilling about her just-published book. The festival line-up includes Hungarian-British David Szalay, who is touring his Booker Prize-winning work, Flesh, and the author of the Slough House espionage series, Mick Herron. Actor-turned-author Bryan Brown will feature his latest crime novel, and comedian, writer and TV host Shaun Micallef will appear alongside I Quit Sugar author Sarah Wilson.

Also among the festival’s leading presenters are former Australian Greens leader Bob Brown, whose 2025 book Defiance: Stories from Nature and Its Defenders, and British philosopher and author A.C. Grayling work For the People: Fighting Authoritarianism, Saving Democracy, join Lattouf’s subject matter to form a conceptual thread exploring truth versus power, and the intersection of resistance and defiance with democracy and civic responsibility.

“With all the women, there were times when they underestimated their own power, and that was something I certainly experienced myself,” Lattouf said. “The one thing that pretty much crossed the board was their strength, drawn from knowing that even if it wasn’t a clear-cut win for them, it would be for those after them. There was this incredible generosity among all of the women – this preparedness to sit in the mud, or go through absolute hell – knowing that, on the other side, it might not be rainbows and celebrations, but it was a step for other women.”

Women Who Win reframes winning as something far more complex than triumph. As the book progresses, Lattouf’s voice, in something close to real time, strengthens and becomes clearer as she gains courage throughout the process. “Winning is a communal and ongoing process, and winning is never static – particularly not for women,” she says. “Wins can be wound back. Progress can be stalled. And unless all women are winning, then I’m not sure it’s a comprehensive win.”

“We have a situation in Australia, for example, where First Nations women are the fastest-growing prison population in the world, and women over the age of 55, broadly, are the fastest-growing homeless population. I just don’t think we can be patting ourselves on the back too much when there are so many women who are suffering and losing in so many ways.”

See Antoinette Lattouf’s Women Who Win session at the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival at Nala Bardip Mia – Margaret River HEART on Sunday, 17 May 2026, and at a Perth satellite event at the State Library of Western Australia with Victoria Midwinter Pitt on Tuesday, 19 May 2026.

The three-day Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival program – the state’s largest regional literary event – spans Margaret River, Busselton and Perth. It features international and Australian authors, workshops and events at venues including Nala Bardip Mia – Margaret River HEART, Busselton Festival Hub, Shelter Brewing, local libraries and the State Library of Western Australia.

Margaret River Readers & Writers Festival 2026 runs between 15-17 May, visit the website to book.

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