Max Porter (born 1981) is an English writer, formerly a bookseller and editor, best known for his debut novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers.[1]
Background
Porter was born in High Wycombe in 1981 and received a degree in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, followed by an MA in which he studied radical performance art, psychoanalysis, and feminism.[2][3] Prior to his writing career, Porter managed the Chelsea branch of Daunt Books[4] and won the Bookseller of the Year Award in 2009. He was Editorial Director at Granta and Portobello Books until 2019.[5]
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers was adapted into a play of the same name, directed by Enda Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy, which premiered in Dublin on 25 March 2019 and has been performed in London and New York.[15] In an interview, Porter details the experience of adapting Grief for the stage: "[w]ith both Cillian and Enda, the goal was to make the production as true as it could be to the book. There were no changed endings or swapping one feature for another".[16] Cillian Murphy won an Irish Times Theatre Award for "Best Actor" for his performance as the grieving father.[17] The play was a New York Times Critic's Pick, with Ben Brantley writing that the performance "beautifully evoke[s] the way in which the whole world seems apocalyptic after a personal tragedy".[18]
On 5 March 2019, Porter's second book Lanny was published by Faber and longlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2019 and Man Booker Prize 2019, and has shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2019.[19] Faber describe Lanny as "a story about a family whose village is peopled by the living and the dead. It’s a story about a boy with a gift for friendship and the traces of enchantment he leaves in the closely woven lives around him".[20] The book examines rural English community life and childhood myth in response to social division and ecological crisis. The book is set to be adapted into a film starring Rachel Weisz.[21][22]
In 2021, Faber released The Death of Francis Bacon, a hybrid poetic prose work that the publishers describe as "seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist’s mind".[23]The Death of Francis Bacon is set during the last days of Francis Bacon's life as he lies dying in Madrid and is written in visceral poetic language which corresponds to Bacon's style of painting. Porter describes the text as an "attempt to write as painting, not about it; an attempt to replicate thought, struggle, the struggle of thought, but also the sheer energy of the eye’s confrontation with the painted image" which is "the result of a long preoccupation [...] with Francis Bacon".[24] Writing for the Scotsman, Stuart Kelly claims that the hybrid work is "not a novel, art criticism or biography" but maintains that it is "a very moving depiction of a mind in dissolution at the very edge of death", noting the influence of Dylan Thomas on Porter's "apocalyptic" style of writing.[25]
Porter's fourth novel, Shy – "the polyphonic story of a troubled teenager" – was published in April 2023 in the UK.[26]
'Max Porter on Paul McCarthy's 'Piccadilly Circus: Fan Letter', Frieze Issue 200 (2019)[38]
"How My Son's Love for Crystal Palace Made Me Fall For Football", autobiographical essay in Mundial[39]
"It Could Be Any Book" in The Gifts of Reading: An Anthology of Essays About the Joys of Reading, Giving and Receiving Books, curated by Jennie Orchard (2020)[40]
"Spirit D'escalier the Size of a Country", for the Aitken Alexander Isolation Series (April 2020)[41]
