In this, Walsh is clearly the person for the job.

Of all the things to try and maintain control of, my bird-like prose poetry fable is not one to hold on to.” “One of the things for me early on was to think of the theatre adaptation as the latest in a line of translations.” Besides, he adds with good spirit, the book is meant to be a bird: “I want it flying away. “I love being translated,” he says from his office in London. “I believe in an economy of trust,” Porter says, “whereby nothing good will come of holding on to things in a protective way.” In part, that is informed by his day job, as editorial director of the publishing house Granta, but he has experience now on both sides of collaboration. But if Porter’s readers feel protective of the work, the author is entirely open to collaboration. Porter’s writing has a skirling energy, hopping between prose and poetry, emotional heft and literary allusions, with the unpredictable and often exhilarating, shape-shifting quality of grief. That makes adaptation sound like a particular challenge. It is an outer body experience, either experiencing grief or falling in love. That's what it feels like when time is cut up and there's no linear narrative to unfold. 'I had written about grief before, but I thought structurally, Max completely captured it.

'It floored me when I read it,' says Enda Walsh, now forging that dramatic language of crisis for the book's stage adaptation for renowned London theatre company Complicité. 'I won't leave until you don't need me anymore,' he tells Dad, part assurance, part threat, sharing the narrative. Swooping into their two-bedroom London flat, comes Crow, perhaps a manifestation from the mind of Dad, a sardonic Ted Hughes scholar, cawing out taunts and consolations. In Max Porter's tremendous first novel, the affecting and nimble Grief is the Thing with Feathers, this absence immediately ushers in a strange new presence. “There should be men in helmets speaking a new and dramatic language of crisis.” “Where are the fire engines? Where is the noise and clamour of an event like this?” run the thoughts of a young boy, bereaved with his brother and their dad following the sudden death of their mother. The worst thing in the world has happened, yet the world doesn’t have the decency to notice.

Grief has feathers