Books like eight ghosts: the english heritage book of new ghost stories

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.

Porter was born in High Wycombe in 1981 and received an MA in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Prior to his writing career, Porter managed the Chelsea branch of Daunt Books and won the Bookseller of the Year Award in 2009. He was Editorial Director at Granta and Portobello Books until 2019.

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, and the International Dylan Thomas Prize. 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.