The Death of Francis Bacon

The Death of Francis Bacon is a novella by Max Porter about Francis Bacon, published in 2021. It is a reimagining of Bacon's deathbed thoughts, in his final six days in April 1992, in a Madrid hospital, alone except for a hospice nun.

The Death of Francis Bacon mixes prose and poetry experimentally. It is a "brief, fragmentary book [. . .] divided into seven chapters of no more than eight small pages." According to Liam Pieper writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, "at about 6000 words, it's something between a short story and a long, messy poem."