Cillian Murphy won an Irish Times Theatre Award for 'Best Actor' for his performance as the grieving father. There were no changed endings or swapping one feature for another'. In an interview, Porter details the experience of adapting Grief for the stage: 'ith both Cillian and Enda, the goal was to make the production as true as it could be to the book. 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.

It has been translated into twenty-seven languages. 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 also been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize for experimental writing. In 2016, Grief won the Sunday Times PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, the Books Are My Bag Readers' Award for fiction,, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Europese Literatuurprijs. 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'. 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. In 2019, Porter was named as a guest curator for the Cheltenham Literary Festival. He was Editorial Director at Granta and Portobello Books until 2019. Prior to his writing career, Porter managed the Chelsea branch of Daunt Books and won the Bookseller of the Year Award in 2009. Porter was born in High Wycombe in 1981 and received a degree in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, followed by an MA in radical performance art, psychoanalysis, and feminism.

Max Porter (born 1981) is an English writer, formerly a bookseller and editor, best known for his debut novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers.

Books by max porter