Rebecca Perry's "May We Feed the King" longlisted for 2026 Booker Prize

BERKELEY—May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry has been longlisted for the Booker Prize, the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction written in English, previously awarded to Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Michael Ondaatje, and Ian McEwan.

May We Feed the King, forthcoming from Transit Books this September, is Perry’s debut novel. It follows a curator who dresses the rooms of historic buildings as she falls into the archive and the life of a forgotten medieval king. Perry’s transfixing debut asks how history takes shape, and how the stories that survive distort the lives they seem to preserve. Laced with desire and longing, May We Feed the King is a searing meditation on the small details and large gaps that make up a life.

The Booker judging panel writes: “May We Feed the King is a wonderfully enticing, and eye-opening, combination of themes, woven together with an extraordinary delicacy of touch. You can’t read May We Feed the King without reflecting on the fragile boundary between the present and the past. What’s the difference between historical fiction and historical fact? Can history ever be a safe place we can go to escape the present?"

Earlier this month, May We Feed the King won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, an annual literary award that celebrates the best first novel in a given year, presented by the British book retailer Waterstones.

Perry, a writer and a poet, is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Beauty/Beauty (2015) and Stone Fruit (2021); four pamphlets; and a work of creative nonfiction, On Trampolining, forthcoming from Transit Books next year. Her poetry has been shortlisted for awards including the T. S. Eliot Prize, and her first collection won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. She lives in London, where she was born in 1986.

May We Feed the King is longlisted alongside twelve other novels—the “Booker Dozen”—by authors including Elizabeth Strout, Marlon James, Gwendoline Riley, Douglas Stuart, Makenna Goodman, and others. The panel, chaired by celebrated classicist Mary Beard, also includes award-winning poet, writer, and educator Raymond Antrobus; musician, writer, and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker; journalist, editor, and critic Rebecca Liu, and Booker Prize–shortlisted novelist, poet, and essayist Patricia Lockwood.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday, September 22, and the winner will be announced on Monday, November 9. The winner will receive £50,000 (approximately $66,500); each shortlisted author will receive £2,500 (approximately $3,500).