There is much dark material in award-winning writer Max Porter’s latest novel, Shy, which explores the thoughts of a troubled teenager and his raft of emotions, anger, raging hormones and violent outbursts.

Meeting Porter today, he lists a catalogue of his own worries about the challenges facing young people – inequality, Tory Britain, the NHS in crisis, cost-of-living crisis, diminished global opportunities post-Brexit, climate change – and that’s just for starters.

“If we accept that it’s always been quite hard to get out of bed when you’re 16 years old, then it’s really hard to get out of bed now. I’m full of sympathy for that.

“It’s a frightening time to be a young man and a compassionate society should be there to support, encourage and nurture young people and there are many ways in which our current society hasn’t done that and is failing them.”

It seems a somewhat depressing start to an interview, yet Porter is an upbeat, talkative guy who sympathises with his seemingly difficult eponymous anti-hero and peppers this unusual novella with wit and poetic asides.

The book is set in 1995 as Shy escapes Last Chance, a home for ‘very disturbed young men’, carrying a rucksack full of rocks.

It explores his stream of consciousness, voices in the troubled teenager’s head, rage, shame, childhood memories, violent outbursts, therapy sessions and bad decisions that brought him to Last Chance, all to a drum and bass soundtrack on his Walkman. Porter listened to 90s drum and bass on his headphones while writing it to set the tempo, he recalls.

The Last Chance setting was sparked when he and his family came upon an old manor house during a walk in the woods near his home in Bath.

“I googled it and found out it had once been an experimental school for badly behaved boys. So I thought, I’m going to make a boy up and put him in it.”

Porter, 41, has come a long way in the past eight years. A former publishing director whose 2015 debut novel, Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, became an award-winning bestseller and whose second novel, Lanny, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, he has also branched out into writing for theatre.

He collaborated with Peaky Blinders actor Cillian Murphy on the stage adaptation of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers and also wrote Murphy a monologue called All Of This Unreal Time, which was later made into a movie.

Writing from home gives him a balanced family life, he agrees. As the father of three sons, aged 13, 10 and seven, he hopes he is prepared for the teenage phases his own children may go through.

A great advocate of emotional honesty and talking – his favourite part of the day is dinner at the table with his family – he will have conversations with his boys about responsibility, compassion and care, he says.

“I’m not yet worried that my teenager is going to go to a rave and take a load of ketamine, but I can understand what that parent feels like. I can put myself in that position. I can feel the powerlessness and the naivety.”

There’s a lot of laughter in his own home, he observes. As a hands-on dad, he does the cooking, the driving (his wife doesn’t drive) and the school run, and reckons he’s quite childlike in his behaviour.

“We have a lot of music, we have a laugh. There’s a lot of farting and funny noises in my house. I hope I’m quite fun. I’m on the football sidelines for two of the children every Sunday. I’m quite involved and hugely grateful that my work allows me to be here.”

He seems pretty broad-minded and liberal in his parenting outlook.

“I feed off the children’s energy and I’m interested in their lives. It’s quite healthy for me not to be like, ‘I’m going off into my special office’.”

He continues: “I’m not going to shake the bed if I find that they’re trying out the things that teenagers try because I know, based on the evidence, that prohibition doesn’t work.”

Porter was himself a “goody two-shoes” growing up in Buckinghamshire, he recalls. He never got into drugs, only excessive drinking – and it was a phase.

“But one of the things I acutely remember is that sense of frustration, that kind of burning, like your brain is clingfilm, and you can’t express what you’re saying, and adults in the room, whether they’re teachers, or parents or whatever, are imploring you to communicate better, and you just can’t.”

He loves the countryside, walking his dog – a goldendoodle called Happy – in the wide-open spaces near his home in Bath, where he moved with his family from London a few years ago.

“I love the hills and the country. I need access to green space. I’m a tree-hugger. Headphones in, dog on the lead, that’s my downtime.”

Born in High Wycombe, Porter studied history of art at Courtauld Institute of Art in London and went from working in an independent bookshop to becoming an editorial director at Granta Publishing before his books took off.

These days, aside from Twitter, Porter avoids social media. “I realised it was making me go a bit mad a year or two ago, so I stopped getting involved. I’ll occasionally post something, but generally I realised it was just destroying my brain.”

His own father died when he was six and as a result, he doesn’t take anything for granted – his greatest pleasures include those simple family dinners.

“There are many things about my dad dying that I think were an incredible blessing. Losing a parent at a young age teaches you how important love is and not to take things for granted, and to have deep sympathy with other people who have lost people. It creates in you an understanding for those who are in the process of grieving.”

His mother remarried and Porter says he’s lucky that he had an incredibly good relationship with his stepfather.

Today, he works closely with the National Literacy Trust and will be supporting the trust when he hosts an evening of poetry and performance in Birmingham on April 29.

He says that the message he hopes readers take from Shy is that every human being deserves our full attention.

“The person that we see skulking in the bus stop with their hood up, smoking a joint or spitting on the floor or involved in some fight – we are trained to see that person as a threat, who is destabilising or upsetting the social order. You’ve got to have sympathy with the situation that the person is in, whether they’re a corrupt politician, or a drug addict, or a person who has just arrived from this country and doesn’t know how to charge up their electric meter.

“To see that person as an inconvenience or an aberration is to misunderstand that you yourself are only one step away from being in that situation.”

He’s currently working on a number of theatre projects and hasn’t ruled out  TV work, although his schedule seems pretty busy.

“Life gets hectic, doesn’t it? I have a lot of writers I mentor and read 15 books at the same time, so I’ve got to be careful not to overload my not-very-great brain.”

Shy by Max Porter is published by Faber on April 6, priced £12.99.