Talk:Max Porter (writer)

Untitled
Thank you for approving this biography page :) An infobox would improve it as a next step I think, with basic biographical information and maybe a creative commons image from somewhere if anyone can find one? Alexithelion (talk) 18:49, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

rejected version
Here is one I wrote up in March 2019 that was rejected for some reason. I can't be bothered to do more work on it but some of it may be salvageable.

Max Porter is a British novelist. He has published two novels, Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny.

His first novel was published in 27 territories and was subsequently adapted for the stage, first in Galway and then at the Barbican Centre in London, directed by Enda Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy.

Lanny was the subject of a dramatic reading at the Southbank Centre in London performed by Kenneth Cranham, Stephen Mangan and Lydia Wilson. The book is set to be adapted for screen starring Rachel Weisz.

Lanny was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019.

Life
Porter was born in High Wycombe in 1981, went to the local state grammar and studied history of art up to MA level at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He became a bookseller and then an editor at Granta. In a 2016 interview with the Times Literary Supplement he claimed to be 'a good freestyle rapper'. He is married with three children, but has been described in interviews as 'guarded about his personal life'.

In 2019, he was named as a guest curator for the Cheltenham Literary Festival.

Published works

 * Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015)
 * Lanny (2019)

Reception
The critical reception for both novels has been positive.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize, and won the Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year 2016   and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

The New York Times wrote that Porter 'has an excellent ear for the flexibility of language and tone, juxtaposing colloquialisms against poetic images and metaphors'. In 2016, The Times noted that 'reviewers had struggled to categorise' Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and the Telegraph wrote that it 'brought him a level of success you might have thought unlikely given what it was: a jagged, elliptical prose poem that is both homage to Ted Hughes’s Crow sequence and a brutally beautiful depiction of two boys and their dad struggling after the death of their mother', noting that it won several awards and has sold 155,000 copies. Adam Mars-Jones wrote in the London Review of Books that the book 'qualifies as a novel by the familiar logic of its not fitting any other category', calling it 'compact and splendid'.

Lanny was endorsed by novelists Mark Haddon, Kamila Shamsie and Maggie O'Farrell and the poet Ocean Vuong. The Sunday Times wrote that it was a 'remarkable feat of literary virtuosity', but cautioning that 'very occasionally, a false note is struck'. The book was shortlisted for the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize in June 2019.