The ‘unpublishable' book that conquered the world

Sydney Morning Herald

18-07-2025

When English author Max Porter wrote his 2015 debut novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, he never imagined it would end up on bookshelves, let alone on world stages.
At the time, he had a lot on his plate as a father of young children, plus a demanding day job as an editor (he's worked on such highbrow titles as Eleanor Catton's Booker Prize winner The Luminaries and Nobel Prize recipient Han Kang's The Vegetarian). With little time for his own creativity, the self-described 'compulsive maker of things' began fiddling with what he had dubbed his 'crow book' in the evening or on public transport.
'I had this preoccupation for a long time in how to tell the story of these two children who lose a parent, which is based in my own life,' says Porter, whose father died when he was six. 'I was sort of walloping through joyful life and wondering why at age 30 I was still wanting to sit down on a Sunday night and weep for my dad.'
The resulting novella became a literary sensation. Its blend of prose, poetry and fable addressed grief not in a didactic manner, but instead with a 'squalid, flapping, unpredictable, scatological madness' as Porter puts it. The work switches between the perspectives of a widowed Ted Hughes scholar, his two boys and the avian visitor Crow, who arrives after the death of their wife and mother and 'won't leave until you don't need me any more'.
When Porter first showed it to people, it was deemed almost unpublishable as it was so unlike anything else in the literary landscape. 'I never thought of it as a thing that would sit in bookshops,' Porter says. 'Even when it came out, people were like, where does it go? In poetry? In fiction? In memoir? And I was always quite pleased with that, let it hop around.'
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The book became not only an international bestseller, but also a critical success, winning the Dylan Thomas Prize and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.
It also set off a flurry of adaptations in its wake, including a 2018 play adapted by Enda Walsh starring Cillian Murphy and a big-screen version with Benedict Cumberbatch that premiered at Sundance Film Festival this year.
When asked about any other reimaginings, Porter reels off a dizzying array of versions he's aware of, a Birmingham dance adaptation, an Argentinian theatre show, a puppet adaptation in Estonia and a person in Stockholm who wants to do an opera of it.