What are you reading right now?

I’m re-reading the six books shortlisted for the International Booker Prize because I’m a judge and we have the unenviable task of choosing one winner. They’re all incredible. 

What book from childhood will always stay with you?

When Marnie Was There by Joan G Robinson. 

What books made you want to write?

Any book by the poet Alice Oswald. 

When and where do you read?

I am married to a person who reads as easily as she breathes, so there are books everywhere. I read before bed, on the loo, on the bus, on the train, on the plane. I am rarely more than three feet from a book. It’s actually a bit silly – we need to get rid of some books. 

Where do you buy books?

Bookshops. I try to buy a book in every single independent bookshop I visit. I’m lucky to live in Bath where we have two of the best: Mr B’s and Toppings. 

Do you belong to a book club? 

Nope, but I turn up to them sometimes, cause arguments and steal the wine. 

How do you choose what to read?

I like to just wander. I’m always reading some poetry, some work research, some work by mentees or friends, and some translated fiction. I keep a crime novel by the bed. I do a graphic novel every now and then. I like to read kids’ books. I read a lot from or about the Middle East these days.

Do you have a favourite author?

Yes, Tarjei Vesaas. 

What's been your favourite read of 2024 so far?

Each of the International Booker Prize shortlisted books have really moved into my soul in wildly different ways. Re-reading books three or four times does something crazy to the way a book acts on you. I’d recommend it! 

What one novel will always stay with you?

Silence by Shusaku Endo. It's one of the greatest accounts of the strangeness and strength of the human spirit ever written. I'm not a religious person but I do love reading novels about faith, seeing into the mechanics of it, the risks and the benefits. 

Favourite biography?

Woman in Berlin, by anonymous. It's a profoundly affecting – and in places quite devastating – account of what war does to people, and how writing about an experience can help you survive it. Both my pacifism and my feminism were forged by the experience of reading this book in my early 20s.

Favourite non-fiction book? 

In a Dark Time, Nicholas Humphrey and Robert Jay Lifton. I'm a lifelong CND/Ban the Bomb/never again type. This book is a magnificent anthology of writings about nuclear weapons, war, peace, human ingenuity versus our tendency towards destruction. I cling to it as the clock ticks towards midnight.

Do you read poetry?

Yes, every day. Even just a quick peek while I’m running a bath or whatever. It's nutrition for a writer. 

What book would you give as a gift? 

I’m an obsessive giver of books. Actually, would you believe the last book I gave as a gift was yesterday, and it was The Gift by Lewis Hyde because I got talking about it with the lady in my local café and she seemed very interested in it, so I ordered it from my local bookshop and my mate who runs the bookshop dropped it into her.

What was the last book that made you cry?

Robert MacFarlane’s latest, Is a River Alive? The sheer force of his thinking, the depth of feeling he harnesses and combines with radical ecological truth, it made me weep. But I cry every day reading the news, so it doesn’t take much for a book to nudge me over. 

Any recommendations for laugh-out-loud books?

I was just reading my mum’s battered old copy of Molesworth this Easter. I didn’t go to private school or live in the early years of the 20th century, so some of the gags are lost on me, but holy shit that is a funny book. Hello Clouds! 

What’s your favourite film or TV adaptation of a book?

The Last of the Mohicans, all day every day! 

Are there any books that have helped you through difficult times?

I don’t want to be facetious, but all times are difficult and all books are a great help. 

Favourite literary character?

Angry Arthur from the Japanese book series of the same name. If you condensed all the books I've mentioned above into 250 words, you'd get this miracle of a book about a temper tantrum. A boys gets angry, destroys the world, destroys the universe, and can't remember why he was so angry. For the attention of Donald Trump, before it's too late. 

What one book should everybody read in their lifetime?

I can’t really answer that; everyone is different. I work a lot with literacy organisations, and the evidence of the benefits of reading is so overwhelming that I’ll just say everybody should read. Any barriers erected between humans and literacy by politics, economics or circumstance should urgently be dismantled. 

Do you have a favourite book of all time?

Yes, In Parenthesis by David Jones. This long poem about the First World War is my ultimate companion and will never bore or exhaust me (or fully make sense to me). A mythic, dense, esoteric, funny, heartbreaking modernist masterpiece. I think it's the pinnacle of 20th-century British poetry. 

And what are you working on right now?

I’m editing an anthology of writing by the Creative Writing group at HMP Erlestoke. I’m helping curate a festival in Cork City called Sounds From A Safe Harbour. And I’m sitting down to read the International Booker Prize shortlisted books again to decide on a winner for 20th May.

Max Porter is chair of the International Booker Prize 2025 judging panel. To see the shortlist, visit TheBookerPrizes.com.