Max Porter is an English author, born in 1981, admired for slender, genre-defying novels that blur the line between prose and poetry.
An art historian by training and a former bookseller, he spent years as an editor at Granta and Portobello Books - working on prize-winning novels by other writers - before his own debut made him one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British fiction.
That debut, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, is a short, formally daring book in which a father and his two sons, reeling from the sudden death of their wife and mother, are visited by a large, unruly, consoling crow; it won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was later adapted for the stage in a searing production starring Cillian Murphy. He has continued to write compact, lyrical, emotionally charged fiction - the village mystery Lanny, the painterly The Death of Francis Bacon, and the single-night portrait of a troubled teenager in Shy.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he writes books that are as much felt as read - brief, intense and quite unlike anyone else's.
