Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is a hybrid of prose and poetic styles about a crow who visits a grieving family of a
Ted Hughes scholar and his two young boys. It draws heavily upon Hughes's
Crow: From the Life and Songs of Crow and its title is derived from
Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers". In 2016,
Grief won the
Sunday Times PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, the
Books Are My Bag Readers' Award for fiction, the 2016
Dylan Thomas Prize, and the 2017
Europese Literatuurprijs. It has also been shortlisted for the
Guardian First Book Award and the
Goldsmiths Prize for experimental writing. Reviewing for
The Guardian, Sarah Crown writes that the book "is heartrending, blackly funny, deeply resonant, a perfect summation of what it means to lose someone but still to love the world – and if it reminds publishers that the best books aren’t always the ones that can be pigeonholed or precised or neatly packaged, so much the better". It has been translated into twenty-seven languages.
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. 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". Cillian Murphy won an
Irish Times Theatre Award for "Best Actor" for his performance as the grieving father. 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". The feature film
The Thing With Feathers, based on Porter’s novel
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, premiered at Sundance 2025. The film was written and directed by Dylan Southern, and stars
Benedict Cumberbatch. Despite Cumberbatch's initial scepticism regarding a film adaptation, he told
Deadline he was won over by Southern's script: "Dylan has handled the deftness of Max’s kinetic poetry masterfully. [...] It holds all the wildly sharp turns of changing tones and colors between the domestic and mythic, between the despair, comedy, and every day of loss." 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". 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.
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". 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. Porter's fourth novel,
Shy – "the polyphonic story of a troubled teenager" – was published in April 2023 in the UK. It was described by
The Irish Times as "a perfect book", which "enthusiastically embrace[s] the lessons of modernism". Porter's own adaptation of the novel
, titled
Steve, was filmed in 2024 and will be distributed globally by Netflix. It was directed by Tim Mielants, stars Cillian Murphy and
Jay Lycurgo, and was produced by Murphy and
Alan Moloney’s company Big Things Films. == Bibliography ==