Over a video call from his Somerset home, which he shares with his wife and three sons, Max Porter is trying to talk about fiction, but getting precisely nowhere. Just out of shot, his 11-year-old son is struggling to locate his trousers. “Dad!” he yells. “I can’t talk,” Porter calls back, in the mildly exasperated tone of a man toggling between author and Dad mode. “They’ll be upstairs or out on the line.” The backdrop to our video call has been blurred out – only Porter, sticky in the heatwave in a black Sonny Rollins T-shirt, is vivid on screen – but the tangle of work and domestic life is crystal clear.Lucky that he’s used to the hullabaloo. Porter knows what it feels like to have people compete for his attention. He thrives on it. “I’m a terrible sayer of the word ‘yes’,” he says. “The overwhelm is the joy for me.” The past few years have been particularly frenetic for the bookseller turned publisher and author. Porter is best known for his 2015 poetic debut Grief is the Thing with Feathers, a powerful meditation on grief, told partly through the perspective of a crow, which was turned into a stage play by Enda Walsh in 2019 with Cillian Murphy in the lead role, and then a film starring Benedict Cumberbatch. He has also penned the novels Lanny, The Death of Francis Bacon and Shy, which became the recent film Steve, also starring Cillian Murphy. Chatty and engaging via video call, Porter is an enthusiastic collaborator, mentor and curator, who – by his own admission – sometimes has to learn the hard way that he needs a break.In 2025, he acted as chair of the judging panel for the International Booker Prize, which recognises translated fiction. It meant reading 154 books in six months. “I’ll never do it again, with the greatest respect to them,” he says. “Because I was the chair, I did feel I had to read every single book. Never again.”My favourite is Stick Man, probably, and we thought Room on the Broom was an absolute masterpiece. Julia Donaldson is brilliant at what she doesIronically, it was while everyone was telling him to slow down and take time off a couple of years ago that the idea for his newly published children’s book arrived. “I was very overwhelmed. Everyone said, ‘Just stop, don’t do anything.’ Book tours, film projects, music projects. Everyone said, ‘You’re going to burn out, you’ve got to stop’, and so I had August off to spend with my kids, and then just immediately wrote this book, in my notebooks, at the kitchen table, and it felt like a total continuation of my work.”A children’s picture book for two- to six-year-olds, Dogs and Bears is a story of competing voices, beautifully illustrated in a bright, zany style by Dorothée de Monfreid. Dogs and bears are brawling, but suddenly they’re surprised by squid raining from the sky. The book doesn’t rhyme, it’s silly and larky, and seemingly scattershot. “I thought it’d be funny if it rambled off and interrupted itself,” says Porter. But fans of the experimental, elliptical and polyphonic style of Porter’s adult novels will recognise the sense that beneath the cacophony, a serious point is being made: violence is not the answer. [ Shy by Max Porter: This is a perfect bookOpens in new window ]“Are we in a doom loop of forever fighting one another?” Porter muses. “I’m interested in a contribution towards seeding ideas of non-violence in young readers and in the people reading to them.”He wants to leave space for the children to find the answers themselves. “Doing things with humour is important, because everything is so serious, and these moral panics that are upon us are so enervating for parents and for children. Modern parenting has become so fraught with this question of ‘What are we protecting them from, what are we exposing them to?’ The picture-book becomes this old-fashioned but radical technology whereby you can sit, laugh at the pictures, talk about it, and give that parental shrug, which means, ‘I don’t know, it’s up to you. What do you think?’”Porter holds no truck with authors who don’t understand the importance of children’s fiction. Or those who maintain a snobbery towards authors who write children’s literature. “I don’t believe in the silo,” he says. “As for me doing it and whether that might affect my standing as a serious literary novelist, I think the fact that literary novelists take themselves so seriously is a problem. I don’t believe in the pedestal.”[ Max Porter: ‘I can’t bear writing about teenagers that seeks to diagnose or patronise them’Opens in new window ]Porter has a sincere love of children’s literature, both old and new. Like most modern-day parents (his kids are 16, 14 and 11), his knowledge of the oeuvre of Julia Donaldson, one of the best selling children’s books authors of all time, runs deep. “You can’t raise children in the 21st century and not have done your time,” he laughs. “My favourite is Stick Man, probably, and we thought Room on the Broom was an absolute masterpiece. Julia Donaldson is brilliant at what she does. For me it’s anything but David Walliams.”From Dogs And Bears by Max Porter Porter’s aversion to Walliams is sincere. He and his wife complained to their son’s school about having books by Walliams in the classroom. The millions-selling Walliams was dropped by HarperCollins in 2025 after numerous controversies. Walliams left his role as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent in 2022 after a leaked transcript from the show was discovered to have included crude comments from Walliams about contestants. The author later apologised. In 2021, a story about a Chinese boy was removed from one of his books after allegations that it included negative stereotypes.“F**k that guy, f**k the work. They are horrible books,” Porter says. “We wrote to the school. We said, ‘Listen, there are infinite, extraordinary children’s books being published. Diverse. The history of the children’s book in this country is one of the richest traditions in global literary history. And you’re giving kids these David Walliams books?’. The teachers were like, ‘I know, we hate them, what can we do?’ It’s weird, it’s like this self-fulfilling prophecy.”Porter has a long history of aligning himself with voices who have a similar energy to him. In Ireland he feels particularly at home because of the variety of artists who feel simpatico. “I’m always happy when I’m in Ireland,” he says. He has been to the Borris House Festival of Writing & Ideas four times and becomes audibly excited even talking about getting a taxi to the Carlow literary get-together. “It’s absolutely magical,” he says. “You just sit around and you’re like, ‘Alright, I’ll have a chat with Mary Robinson. And now Bob Geldof. Here’s the Hothouse Flowers.’”Cillian [Murphy], I love him with my whole heart, it’s a life-changing friendship. Mary Hickson is one of my closest friends. My next book is dedicated to herHe finds England hard right now. “There’s a bad vibe in the country. There’s something corrosive in the English spirit. We’re on a perpetual civil war footing, you could spot it from 10, 15 years ago politically. I luxuriate in the happier vibe, whether I’m at Cúirt festival in Galway seeing friends or out with Cill [Cillian Murphy] walking up a hill with his dogs. The kindness is nourishing to me.”Porter is a co-curator of the Sounds From a Safe Harbour music and arts festival in Cork, along with Cillian Murphy and producer Mary Hickson, among others. It’s a festival that operates from several different locations in Cork and has a distinctly lo-fi eclectic feel, with headliners in years past including Wilco, Beth Orton and Jon Hopkins. Planning the festival is a big part of Porter’s life. “I’m very embedded in that community,” he says. “Cillian, I love him with my whole heart, it’s a life-changing friendship. Mary Hickson is one of my closest friends. My next book is dedicated to her.”[ Max Porter: Pushing the boundaries of the written wordOpens in new window ]His forthcoming novel has been in the works, he says, for four or five years. “It’s about a middle-aged woman, and I borrow very freely but very carefully from my mother, my aunt, friends I’ve had, and some people I lost a long time ago. It felt like holding a seance for the living and the dead.” He expects it will come out next February from Faber, which will no doubt please his wife, as he was, he says, in a kind of trance writing it. “She said, ‘Well, you went a bit mad,’” he laughs. The couple are very close, and he is unashamedly romantic as he speaks about her. “I’m more in love with her than I’ve ever been as we approach midlife.”It’s interesting to hear Porter talk so happily about his community of friends and family, in part because his books have so often dealt with the blackest of topics: bereavement, loneliness and abandonment. Grief is the Thing with Feathers punches particularly hard, as it delivers its story of a grieving widower and his two young sons. Taking it on book tour, readers in signing queues would come up to Porter to tell him their own stories of loss. “I have some sort of grotesque expertise now,” he says. He knows books on grief can help at times. “Ten years after it came out, I feel proud of it, that it can offer some solace, some balm for people in the worst pain.” He’s had losses himself in his family in recent times that have, he says, “walloped” him, although he, for understandable reasons of privacy, skirts over the details. He also travelled to Palestine last year for the Palestine Festival of Literature, an experience that deeply informed his view of the “small, ordinary miracle” of his everyday world. He knows where his happiness lies: it’s in domestic life with his wife and family. “Making dinner for my boys is the best thing in the world,” he says. “I often burst into tears and they all find it very funny. But the gratitude is incalculable. The luck.”Then he shoots off, presumably to check on some trousers. Dogs and Bears, by Max Porter, is published by Faber