Max Porter on Shy: 'I feel wildly lucky to do this for a living’

Initially he was a bookseller, and a very good bookseller at that, managing the award-winning Chelsea branch of Daunt Books. After that he became an editor, and a very good editor at that, working as Editorial Director at Granta and Portobello Books. And then in 2015 he published his first book, and, well, you can guess the rest. Grief is the Thing with Feathers won the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Books Are My bag Readers’ Award for fiction, whilst also being shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and a Goldsmiths Prize.

There has been no stopping Porter’s written output since, with Grief… followed by poetry, essays, lyrics, shorts stories, and further novels, the latest of which, Shy, was published in April 2023. To celebrate its launch, Porter joined us here at the Southbank Centre for a special reading event featuring Ruth Wilson, Tony Jones and David Alade voicing passages from the book.

Like you we couldn’t wait for this, nor to hear Porter’s insight into Shy, and his evolving experience as a writer since his successful debut. But unlike you we had the means to ask him about it in advance. So we did. And in doing so discovered that loveliest of things; someone who really does love what they do. 

Eight years on from the publication of your debut book Grief is the Thing with Feathers, has the success of that book sunk in? Did you ever expect it to be as successful as it has been?

It’s extremely strange and very humbling. The thing I find most extraordinary is the translations, that such a small strange book would take flight in other languages. I recently watched the Dutch dramatic version and it was so supremely odd, but also weirdly natural, to be sitting in a room with 500 people watching this intimate exchange between a man acting as a crow and his two children acting as crows, in a language I don’t speak, and feeling the audience reeling from the pain they were witnessing. For me that’s where any success of the work lies, in its ability to keep working on people, as an emotional proposition.

You’ve experienced literature from all angles really – having managed a bookshop, and worked as an editor for a publisher, as well as being a writer and reader – do you think this has helped you in your writing?

I worried for some time that it would be an impediment, that books would feel like products, that writing would feel like work, but I’ve washed it all off very easily these last few years and feel at home in my head and in my shed. I try to push back at some of the received wisdom of the market, because I think some of that wisdom simplifies (or patronises, or belittles, or cons) readers. But yes, I feel really blessed to have worked in these areas and feel more certain today of what I felt on my first day working in a bookshop, which is that books are vital, and we need them, and the benefits of literacy and literature are incalculable.

You’re now a full-time writer; has this changed how you approach your writing? Does it give you greater freedom to explore ideas, or does it perhaps place more pressure on you?

It gives me a stroppy attitude with the kids and the dog and a greater desire for my taxes to be spent on hospitals not missiles! Yes, I have total freedom, and a great boss, haha. And I like a bit of pressure, I want to be ambitious with the work and with the range and variety of collaborations I take on. I need to be busy. I take on mentees so as not to stew, so as to keep learning and keep editorial sensibilities in the centre of my writing life. I feel wildly lucky to do this for a living, and feel like I haven’t started yet. I lie awake at night planning my next book and feeling a burning joy at the challenge of it, the journey I want to go on with it. I love my job. 

‘I feel more certain today of what I felt on my first day working in a bookshop… books are vital, and we need them, and the benefits of literacy and literature are incalculable.’

We’re less than a month away from the UK publication of your novel Shy, what can we expect from the book, and what do you hope readers will take from it

Someone just told me it’s like having a brick thrown through the window of their mind. So… that’s a possible outcome. It’s a fairly intense reading experience, and contains a great deal of violence, both actual and linguistic. It’s about a very unhappy teenage boy in 1995. He is bombarded by the voices in his head, his nightmares, his parents, his teachers, his peers, ghosts and non-human presences who stalk him over three hours of one night. My hope is that readers will feel acutely, even physically, involved in this person’s struggle. A sensory engagement with his fractured state. And they will finish the book and continue to think about it, relate it to their own experience, translate it into their own emotional and political terrain and have felt it worthwhile, as a meeting and an experience. Maybe hopeful, but hope’s a knottier thing…

What was the inspiration for Shy?

I got lost in some woods – woods which I later found out are famously haunted – and that night I had a dream about an angry boy throwing rocks. Flints. I wanted to create this boy out of people I have known and people I can imagine and see if I could use the tools of literary fiction, the sort of prose/poem/play hybrid I’ve been developing across my books, to shine a light on him, not to diagnose him, or deploy him as a moral vehicle, but to dig into the granular detail of his consciousness and try and make an almost musical avatar of it with language and form on the page.

We’ve read that your writing always starts with drawing; what did the initial imagery that led to Shy look like?

I did the one drawing, that morning. A hooded boy in a pond wearing a backpack, half submerged, entangled with wormy watery lines, with a house on the hill behind him and a huge full moon. Other projects have been whole sketchbooks, but this drawing was enough, I ran to my laptop and out poured Shy.

With Grief… being adapted for the stage, and your second novel Lanny being picked up for a film adaptation, did the possibility of future adaptation influence you at all during the writing of Shy?

Nope. I think that way madness lies. I am obsessed with the internal world of the work when I’m making it. Plus it’s a plotless novel in the dark so I don’t think it screams to be filmed. Prove me wrong, Pedro Almodóvar!

‘I feel wildly lucky to do this for a living… I lie awake at night planning my next book and feeling a burning joy at the challenge of it, the journey I want to go on with it. I love my job.’

How does it feel being in this hinterland space between the completion of a novel, and its publication? Are you nervous about its reception? Excited?

I love doing events and I am pleased that now, at this point in our country’s history, I can go out and discuss rage and shame, compassion, progressive education, why a kid might viscerally hate a Tory MP, why a kid might be having night terrors, what did we think the future looked like in 1995, and where are we now? I greatly enjoy the conversational aspect of a book tour, and we’ve got some good things planned with music and actors and young people. I don’t want to be alone on stage, telling people about this book, I want to listen, and play and start conversations.

Beyond your novels you’ve written short stories, poetry, lyrics, essays and features. Do you have a preferred medium, or is it a case of seeing what form an idea takes?

Yup, I like to see what happens. A story I thought was a novel is going to be a play. A talk I gave about Homer is going to be a graphic novel.

Your appearance at the Southbank Centre sees you present a dramatic reading of Shy with Toby Jones, Ruth Wilson and David Alade; have you worked with any of these artists before? And how are you looking forward to their take on your work?

I’m honoured and thrilled to be doing it with them. Amazed. A little intimidated. I’ve not worked with them, but I’ve met Ruth, and Toby voiced Crow for a radio adaptation. I have just missed David’s Sunny Side Up at Theatre Peckham but it looked incredible. Shy will become something totally different when cut up and shared between these actors, a unique thing for the audience in the room. For a polyphonic book this must be the greatest birthday treat ever. Lucky Shy.

Interview by Glen Wilson