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

BERKELEY, September 22, 2026—May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction written in English, alongside five other novels.

May We Feed the King, forthcoming from Transit Books on September 29, 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 judges call May We Feed the King “an affecting and lush jewel of a novel that moves between our present-day world to a medieval court... Perry reminds us that we, too, will become the stuff of history, thus urging us to look at the world around us with a renewed appreciation. What do we have now that we would mourn losing? What do we want our gift to the future to be?"

“I feel so incredibly fortunate, and frankly not a little disbelieving, to have made the Booker Prize shortlist alongside writers I admire so much,” says Perry. “What the prize has already done for the life of my book is astonishing and I’m thrilled that the story gets to continue a little longer.”

This summer, May We Feed the King won the 2026 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. It was also selected for the American Booksellers Association Indie Next List, drawn from recommendations by booksellers at independent bookstores across the United States.

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 spring. 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 joins five other novels on the shortlist: The End of Everything by M. John Harrison, The Disappearers by Marlon James, Black Bag by Luke Kennard, The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout, and John of John by Douglas Stuart.

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.

Each shortlisted author receives £2,500 (approximately $3,500); the winner, to be announced on Monday, November 9, will receive £50,000 (approximately $66,500).