Max Porter

Max Porter is an award-winning novelist whose books have been translated into thirty-eight languages. His debut, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, was a Sunday Times Top 100 Novel of the 21st Century, and won the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, and the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Grief became a film starring Benedict Cumberbatch as well as a stage production starring Cillian Murphy at the St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, where it was a New York Times Critics' Pick. His Sunday Times top ten bestselling novel Lanny was longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Wainwright Prize. His novel Shy was a #1 Sunday Times bestseller, and inspired the Netflix film Steve, for which Porter wrote the BAFTA-nominated screenplay. Prior to his writing career, he was a bookseller at Daunt Books in London, where he won the Young Bookseller of the Year Award, and the editorial director at Granta Books. In 2020, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is currently writer in residence in a UK prison, associate artist at the Southbank Centre, and chaired the judging panel for the International Booker Prize 2025. Porter lives in Bath, England, with his family.