The B List with Patrick Mullins

Join us online for The B List book club hosted by Bri Lee.

Each month Bri is in conversation with a contemporary author followed by a Q&A session.

Bri will be joined by award winning author Patrick Mullins to discuss his new book, The Trials of Portnoy. For more than seventy years, a succession of politicians, judges, and government officials in Australia worked in the shadows to enforce one of the most pervasive and conservative regimes of censorship in the world. The goal was simple: to keep Australia free of the moral contamination of impure literature. Under the censorship regime, books that might damage the morals of the Australian public were banned, seized, and burned; bookstores were raided; publishers were fined; and writers were charged and even jailed. But in the 1970s, that all changed.

Fifty years after the event, Patrick Mullins has written the first full account of an audacious publishing decision that — with the help of booksellers and readers around the country — forced the end of literary censorship in Australia.