This is the second post in which we examine the six writers shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize, with the winner to be announced on Monday, 9 November.

This research report was drafted and synthesised with the assistance of Google Gemini, an AI large language model.

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Historiographic Metafiction and the Poetics of the Archive

The publication of Rebecca Perry’s debut novel, May We Feed the King (Granta, 2026), marks a significant formal intervention in contemporary Anglophone historical fiction¹. Shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize and honored with the 2026 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, the novel investigates the epistemological fractures inherent to the historical record¹. Rather than treating historical fiction as an exercise in archival reconstruction or period verisimilitude, Perry approaches the past through an elliptical, dual-stranded narrative that operates simultaneously as an intimate psychological study and a meta-textual critique of narrative authority⁴.

The work moves between two distinct environments: an unspecified medieval court presided over by an unnamed, deeply reluctant monarch, and a contemporary institutional setting where an unnamed museum curator reconstructs that ruler’s royal banqueting tables using replica foodstuffs¹. Through this bifurcated architecture, Perry exposes the mechanisms by which historical knowledge is manufactured, curated, and consumed⁵. The text interrogates the enterprise of historiography itself, examining how human vulnerability and bureaucratic statecraft are flattened by the survival of historical artifacts⁵. By withholding conventional identifying anchors—such as calendar dates, geographic territories, and proper names—the novel constructs an allegorical puzzle-box that confronts the reader with the radical instability of institutional history and human memory alike⁷.

Authorial Trajectory: From Lyric Poetry to Narrative Fiction

Before turning to long-form prose, Rebecca Perry established a distinguished reputation within contemporary British poetry¹. Born in Croydon, South London, in 1986, Perry completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester in 2008². Her early poetic output demonstrated a sustained fascination with the tactile intimacy of domestic objects, somatic boundaries, and the quiet tensions of human vulnerability⁴. Her debut pamphlet, Little Armoured (Seren Books, 2011), received the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Poetry Prize, and in 2014 she became a co-editor of the online poetry journal Poems in Which¹¹.

Perry’s first book-length poetry collection, Beauty/Beauty (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), was named a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in 2017, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for First Full Collection². Her subsequent full collection, Stone Fruit (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, deepened her focus on domestic grief, physical detachment, and the uncanny weight of inanimate objects². Complementing her full collections are targeted poetry pamphlets, including cleanliness of rooms and walls (2017), insect & lilac (2019, co-authored with Amy Key), and Beaches (2019)¹¹.

Perry expanded beyond lyric verse with On Trampolining (Makina Books, 2023), a work of creative nonfiction rooted in her background as a nationally and internationally competitive trampolinist⁴. In On Trampolining, she wove meditations on bodily discipline, pain, vertigo, grief, and physical expectation in relation to athletic performance and memory¹³. This acute sensitivity to physical restraint and somatic awareness carried directly into the formal composition of May We Feed the King⁴.

Perry composed the novel almost entirely while seated in the bath, utilizing a wooden tray, a quiet domestic vantage point, and strict physical parameters to induce mental focus⁴. Rather than emerging from an initial interest in historical period drama, the novel originated from two independent short stories: one detailing a contemporary woman using replica food displays to conjure domestic spirits, and the other chronicling an attendant caring for an ailing monarch³. When Perry realized that both narratives probed identical thematic questions regarding care, surveillance, and the mediation of reality, she merged the storylines into a single novelistic project¹⁵. Perry has also cited the influence of Percival Everett’s The Trees on her comprehension of the elastic capacities of the novel form, alongside the enduring stylistic mark of Federico García Lorca’s lyric poetics¹⁵.

Work	Publication Year	Genre / Form	Primary Publisher	Major Honors & Distinctions
Little Armoured	2011	Poetry Pamphlet	Seren Books	Winner, Purple Moose Poetry Prize11
Beauty/Beauty	2015	Poetry Collection	Bloodaxe Books	Winner, Michael Murphy Memorial Prize (2017); Shortlisted, T. S. Eliot Prize2
cleanliness of rooms and walls	2017	Poetry Pamphlet	If a Leaf Falls Press	—11
Beaches	2019	Poetry Pamphlet	Broken Sleep Books	—11
insect & lilac (with Amy Key)	2019	Poetry Pamphlet	3/99	—11
Stone Fruit	2021	Poetry Collection	Bloodaxe Books	Poetry Book Society Recommendation2
On Trampolining	2023	Creative Nonfiction / Memoir	Makina Books	Acclaimed lyrical study of sport and embodiment11
May We Feed the King	2026	Novel	Granta Books (UK) / Transit Books (US)	Winner, Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize; Shortlisted, Booker Prize 20261

Narrative Architecture and Plot Dynamics of May We Feed the King

The narrative of May We Feed the King unfolds across two temporal planes, deliberately avoiding explicit markers of epoch or geography¹. The historical strand focuses on a medieval monarch who was never educated or positioned to inherit sovereign responsibility¹. Third in the line of succession, he ascends the throne solely due to the sudden, untimely deaths of his two elder brothers⁴. Lacking any innate appetite for dominion, violence, or political intrigue, the sovereign emerges as a reluctant ruler trapped in a hostile court⁴.

The court around the monarch operates under institutional paranoia and palace gossip⁴. Whispers circulate through stone corridors questioning his mental competence and fitness to rule⁴. The king fundamentally rejects the traditional obligations of medieval sovereignty: he refuses to enact state violence, adamantly avoids ordering public executions, ignores the expansionist military recommendations of his war council, and declines to levy burdensome taxes upon the peasantry⁷. His courtly existence is defined by persistent friction with an entrenched, inherited chief advisor, an emotional detachment from his queen (whose open romantic infidelity he regards with placid indifference), and an intimate, uneasy reliance upon a young attendant⁹.

The king retreats from statecraft into small, domestic, and horticultural realities⁸. He is haunted by the folk legend of the “Apple King”—an ancestral predecessor who abdicated the throne, fled into the wilderness, and pelted the soldiers dispatched to recapture him with wild apples⁹. In one of the novel’s central scenes, the king wanders like an alien tourist into his own palace kitchens; there, he asks the cooks how cinnamon cakes are baked and holds an ordinary, unbroken egg in his palm for the first time in his life, marveling at its fragile material completeness⁹.

The structural bridge between these distant epochs is established through thematic mirroring rather than direct causality. In the medieval continuum, the reluctant monarch experiences sovereignty as bodily objectification, observed exclusively through the distorted gaze of courtiers, a hostile chief advisor, and an adulterous queen. This historical world is then paralleled and reconstructed across centuries in the modern continuum, where the contemporary museum curator, accompanied by the palace archivist, uses archival fragments and replica banquets to interpret the monarch’s elusive existence.

The contemporary narrative strand bookends and intersects this medieval setting⁹. It centers on an unnamed museum curator who, reeling from an unspoken personal loss, accepts a commission to dress the private royal apartments and banquet tables of the preserved palace for public exhibition⁹. Resisting administrative demands for an expedient, generalized display, the curator forms a quiet, emotionally delicate relationship with the palace archivist⁹. Together, they delve into surviving registers, fragments, and records documenting the reluctant king’s brief, anomalous reign⁹.

The curator encounters the historical king primarily through his archival erasure, breaking into tears upon recognizing “what a reduction of a life” the surviving paperwork represents¹⁰. Determined to stage an exhibition that captures the physical presence of human life rather than pedagogical generalities, the curator procures historically accurate replica foodstuffs³. This professional fixation becomes an obsessive personal refuge from the grief of her modern existence⁴. When the palace opens to the public, the curator addresses a tour group of forty visitors, demanding that they reject the fantasy of historical certainty and confront the reality that historical traces reveal more about the desires of the observer than the truth of the deceased⁷.

Thematic and Theoretical Analysis

Sovereignty, Objecthood, and Bodily Refusal

The central thematic paradox of the novel concerns the dialectic between sovereign agency and bodily objecthood¹⁰. In theory, the monarch possesses absolute political authority: he holds the legal monopoly on lethal force, the power to initiate wars, and the right to command fleets¹⁸. Yet, in practice, the royal body is entirely expropriated by the state⁴. Perry illustrates this dynamic through micro-corporeal details: when the monarch notices an apple hanging from an orchard branch, he is forbidden from picking it himself; instead, a servant must step forward to sever it for him¹⁸.

The novel demonstrates how the institution of the monarchy hollows out the subject, reducing the king to an ornamental fetish of the realm⁴. His succession embodies the institutional absurdity of the hereditary maxim “the king is dead, long live the king,” wherein the mortal human being is instantly erased to maintain the symbolic continuity of the crown⁴. By refusing to govern, execute, or conquer, the king conducts a quiet, stubborn rebellion against the demands of sovereign masculinity⁷. He attempts to reclaim personal agency through radical inaction, choosing horticulture, quiet wandering, and metabolic fasting over martial conquest⁴.

Material Simulacra and the Curatorial Illusion

Perry juxtaposes the king’s physical withdrawal with the curator’s hyper-material labor³. The curator’s profession revolves around the procurement and tactical placement of artificial food items: powdered faux Camembert cheeses, gritty small replica potatoes, artificial pomegranates, and an oyster shell fabricated for £31.25³. This focus on plastic and wax facsimiles introduces a meta-theoretical inquiry into historical simulation³. The curator attempts to bridge temporal distance through material hyper-realism, seeking to evoke authentic human presence via artificial means⁷.

This curatorial methodology foregrounds the constructed nature of historical exhibition⁵. A museum display does not recover the past; rather, it fabricates a tableau that pacifies the modern visitor’s desire for chronological legibility⁵. The curator’s sensory manipulation—arranging wax fruits alongside artificial game pies—mirrors the novelist’s craft, emphasizing that both curation and novel-writing are artificial stagings that simulate lost bodies through material details⁵.

The Puzzle-Box Architecture of Surveillance

A persistent formal technique in May We Feed the King is the total mediation of perspective⁷. Perry never provides direct, interior access to the king’s thoughts⁴. Instead, his character is constructed exclusively from oblique vantage points: court gossip, whispered conversations overheard through door cracks, reflections in cloudy mirrors, and sightings from high stone casements⁷.

This visual framing transforms the reader into a spectral observer creeping through palace halls⁷. The subjects of the court project their own neuroses and desires onto their non-committal sovereign⁴. For instance, a maid-of-honour oscillates between imagining an intimate sexual liaison with the royal couple and plotting their assassination⁴. By framing the king entirely through third-party surveillance, Perry demonstrates that historical figures are continually invented by the gaze of their contemporaries and their descendants⁷. The text refuses the conventions of the standard biographical novel, forcing the reader to interpret an unstable collage of fragmented observations⁷.

Historiographical Skepticism and the Politics of Ambiguity

The curator’s work culminates in an open rejection of tidy historical narratives⁷. In her concluding remarks to the museum public, the curator characterizes the king’s obscure, unrecorded death as an act of resistance against the archival urge to domesticate historical mystery, calling his lack of a documented end a defiance against anyone seeking to “manhandle ambiguity into order”¹⁰.

The novel highlights the profound bias of the archive, illustrating how surviving documents typically privilege bureaucratic violence, dynastic taxation, and military conflict while omitting the textures of mundane survival⁴. By writing historical fiction that exists intentionally outside traditional genre tropes, Perry engages directly with contemporary political landscapes³. The author explicitly noted that observing modern global conflicts—and the despotic actions of authoritarian state leaders—informed her depiction of the court⁴. In this light, the medieval king’s refusal of belligerence reads as a sharp critique of tyrannical statecraft and toxic political dominance⁴.

Institutional and Critical Reception

The critical reception of May We Feed the King established Rebecca Perry as a significant new voice in British fiction¹. The novel was selected for the six-novel shortlist for the 2026 Booker Prize by a judging panel chaired by classicist Dame Mary Beard and including poet Raymond Antrobus, musician Jarvis Cocker, literary critic Rebecca Liu, and author Patricia Lockwood⁶. As the only debut novel on the 2026 shortlist, May We Feed the King competed alongside high-profile works by established literary figures, including former Booker laureates Marlon James and Douglas Stuart²².

Author	Novel Title	Country of Origin	UK Publisher	Key Narrative Focus
M. John Harrison	The End of Everything	United Kingdom	Serpent’s Tail	Post-apocalyptic coastal scavengers and state collapse6
Marlon James	The Disappearers	Jamaica	Hamish Hamilton	The long aftermath of a violent 1988 attack on a Kingston queer theatre troupe6
Luke Kennard	Black Bag	United Kingdom	John Murray	Academic satire based on a 1960s campus psychology experiment6
Rebecca Perry	May We Feed the King	United Kingdom	Granta Books	Dual-timeline interrogation of historical curation and reluctant medieval sovereignty[cite: 6, 23, 24]
Elizabeth Strout	The Things We Never Say	United States	Viking Press	A Massachusetts history teacher navigating familial rupture in the 2024 political landscape6
Douglas Stuart	John of John	United Kingdom / US	Picador	Queer generational and religious conflict on the Isle of Harris6

In their formal assessment, the Booker Prize judging panel commended Perry’s novel as a “lush jewel” characterized by “an extraordinary delicacy of touch”³. The judges noted that the book investigates the fragile boundary separating past and present, offering an eye-opening look at the labor of historical reconstruction through replica foods while mounting a thoughtful critique of male dominance and imperial ambition³.

Earlier in the year, the novel was awarded the prestigious Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, with Waterstones Head of Books Bea Carvalho lauding the text for its “crisp, cool prose, and its playfully enigmatic approach to storytelling”¹.

Literary critics broadly praised Perry’s formal control and structural experimentation⁵. Writing for The Guardian, Melissa Harrison described the novel as an “ingenious” and “dazzling puzzle-box of a book which deliberately wrongfoots the reader at every turn,” observing that Perry forces readers to sit with archival frustration as their minds attempt to assemble a coherent picture out of deliberate historical omissions¹. In the Times Literary Supplement, Clemmie Read situated Perry’s text within the lineage of British historiographic metafiction—specifically citing Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot and A. S. Byatt’s Possession—while noting that Perry makes scholarly obsession stranger and more physical through the tactile labor of staging replica banquets⁷. Reviewer Lauren Elkin observed that the monarch’s persistent refusal to exercise executive agency transforms his reign into a “narrative without plot,” destabilizing standard expectations of historical fiction to produce a sharp commentary on the mechanisms of storytelling itself⁷.

Conclusion

Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King demonstrates how lyrical poetry can invigorate and expand contemporary prose fiction⁵. By resisting linear exposition and standard biographical conventions, the novel models an alternative form of historical fiction—one that prioritizes sensory resonance, archival skepticism, and formal restraint over spectacle⁴.

Through its deliberate omissions, the work transforms historical absence into an artistic virtue⁹. By staging a dialogue between the modern curator’s artificial banquets and the medieval king’s quiet resistance to executive power, Perry provides an ethical defense of ambiguity⁷. In an era dominated by nationalist mythmaking and authoritarian assertions of historical destiny, May We Feed the King serves as a profound meditation on the dignity of refusal, the limitations of empirical knowledge, and the fragile, imaginative ways the living attempt to communicate with the dead⁷.

Works cited

1. May We Feed the King – Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_We_Feed_the_King
2. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry | Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242252419-may-we-feed-the-king
3. May We Feed the King – The Booker Prizes, https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/may-we-feed-the-king
4. Reading guide: May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry, https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/reading-guide-may-we-feed-the-king-by-rebecca-perry
5. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry – Transit Books, https://www.transitbooks.org/books/maywefeedtheking
6. 2026 Booker Prize – Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Booker_Prize
7. Book Marks reviews of May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry, https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/may-we-feed-the-king-booker-prize-finalist/
8. https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/what-the-judges-said-the-booker-prize-2026-shortlist
9. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry – Lonesome Reader, https://lonesomereader.com/blog/2026/8/9/may-we-feed-the-king-by-rebecca-perry
10. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/23/may-we-feed-the-king-by-rebecca-perry-review-a-dazzling-puzzle-box-of-a-debut
11. Rebecca Perry – Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Perry
12. A. K. Blakemore in conversation with Rebecca Perry – Daunt Books, https://dauntbooks.co.uk/shop/events/ak-blakemore/
13. On Trampolining : Rebecca Perry : 9781739616014 – Blackwell’s, https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/On-Trampolining-by-Rebecca-Perry/9781739616014
14. ON TRAMPOLINING by Rebecca Perry – Good Press, https://goodpress.co.uk/products/on-trampolining-by-rebecca-perry
15. https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/rebecca-perry-interview
16. Lonesome Reader, https://lonesomereader.com/
17. May We Feed the King, by Rebecca Parry – A Bookish Type, https://www.abookishtype.com/2026/09/25/may-we-feed-the-king-by-rebecca-parry/
18. 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week, https://lithub.com/5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-17/
19. Rebecca Perry discusses her debut May We Feed The King, https://www.thebookseller.com/books/books-on-podcasts-prize-winner-rebecca-perry-reflects-on-her-lauded-debut
20. The Booker Prize 2026, https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/2026
21. Shortlist for 2026 Booker Prize revealed after judges’ “tussle”, https://www.hotpress.com/culture/shortlist-for-2026-booker-prize-revealed-after-judges-tussle-23162448
22. the 2026 Booker Prize Shortlist is here – The Cold Magazine, https://thecoldmagazine.co.uk/theatre-literature/2026-booker-prize-shortlist/
23. King, scavenger and man in a bag: Inside the 2026 Booker shortlist, https://indianexpress.com/article/books-and-literature/kings-scavengers-and-a-man-in-a-bag-inside-the-2026-booker-shortlist-10889767/
24. Everything you need to know about the Booker Prize 2026 shortlist, https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-booker-prize-2026-shortlist
25. Book review: May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry (Granta, https://www.judith-wilson.co.uk/journal/book-review-may-we-feed-the-king-by-rebecca-perry-granta-1499