Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King, the freshly crowned winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2026 and our Fiction Book of the Month for August, is a mesmerising exploration of our relationship with history, storytelling and the silences that inhabit both. It follows a curator commissioned to bring a medieval palace to life for its 750-year anniversary, and its one-time inhabitant – the reluctant King, whose life and short reign are shrouded in mystery and hearsay. In this exclusive Q&A, the author discusses the themes of her novel with Anna Orhanen.
AO: Rebecca, warmest congratulations on winning the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2026! How did you feel when you heard the news?
RP: Completely stunned, honestly. I don’t think anyone expects to hear their name in that moment. I’ve said it a hundred times now but there really is something so special about the fact that it’s voted for by booksellers, and collectively how many hours of reading, thinking and dedication have gone into putting the shortlist together. I feel so lucky.
AO: I loved the ways May We Feed the King explores our relationship with the past, approaching history as a fluid, living thing rather than a fixed object of study. Through the characters of the Curator and the Archivist in particular, it becomes something to be communicated with, not just examined. What first drew you to these themes, and how did your characters come to you?
RP: This is such a beautiful reading – thank you. The very basic answer is that I have always felt in communion with the past – that kind of zing of feeling when you walk into a certain building that feels exciting, or how the atmosphere of a certain room just sits on your chest a little more heavily. I suppose I’m also interested in the indisputable fact that time will simply keep passing no matter what we do, and how we find ways to reckon with the past in the light of that knowledge.
People from the past are no more fixed in time than we are – nothing about them is final or true. To study anything is to interact with it from a position of power – that thing is pinned down or written or immovable – so I wanted to even out that balance and have the past and the people within it pushing back with their own contradictions and questions.
In terms of the characters themselves, the young attendant to the King appeared to me first – an inexperienced and gentle man tending to a dying King. He led me to the King who would replace the ailing one. The Curator started out not as a professional, but as a woman using replica food scenes in her home to conjure people to co-habit with. I fear she came to me via my own obsession with replica scenes.
AO: By omitting names, keeping settings vague and incorporating contradictory viewpoints, your book beautifully relies on the reader’s imagination. This absence of ‘factual’ information produces an incredible sense of intimacy, highlighting things often absent from historical records – such as feelings, inner values and sensory details – and revealing just how deeply they affect our perception of the world. Did you intend from the outset to make the reader an active witness to the impossibility of objective, bias-free history?
RP: Absolutely. The decision to omit all those details you mention, which we so often rely on in historical fiction to tether ourselves to a place and period in time, was an exercise in inviting the reader to fill those gaps and, I hope, in the process interrogate what they have filled those gaps with. Clearly, historical fiction is typically the art of breathing life into the records we have access to, using them as the scaffold, and I knew I wanted to do something different; I suppose starting with the breath and life and seeing if it held.
I also wanted to set up certain viewpoints – lots of scenes and conversations are viewed through windows without sound, through cracks in doors etc. – that clearly signal the reader as a witness in the moment. I’m so glad you read it as an invitation to intimacy; I know that some readers find it leaves them cold or disorientated which was a risk I knew I was taking. It works for some people and not for others, such is the joy of experiments in fiction!
AO: The Curator, much like an artist, uses artifice to conjure a sense of reality in her designs, planting subtle cues to point to what is absent and inviting the spectator to complete the scene. Your book structurally echoes this idea – that truth essentially resides in the same place as enigma: in the silences and gaps between facts. How did you navigate these narrative silences while writing? Did you maintain in your mind a hidden blueprint of what ‘actually happened’?
RP: When I started writing the book, I had no plan for it and no idea where it would end up. I just let it take me where it wanted and, while I was ultimately the one making decisions about what to include and what to leave out, I’m essentially in the same position as the reader in that I have no idea ‘what happened’ or what the ‘true’ account of events is, which I think is consistent with what sits at the heart of the book. No one can know that absolute truth of anything – present or past – and so to have that and withhold it as a writer would have been antithetical to the exercise. Navigating the gaps and silences was interesting, though, and there was definitely work done in collaboration with my editor where we explored what needed fleshing out and where opacity was necessary. I definitely left more to the imagination in the first drafts, and then came the work of understanding that people cannot read your mind, and part of your job as a writer is to connect with the reader.
AO: Through the tragedy of the reluctant ruler, your novel brilliantly interrogates the nature of power. While the King is forced into a position he never desired, his ultimate act of defiance is choosing not to comply with expectation – a move for which history brands him a failure. Through it, he claims a deeper authority, however: the freedom to stay true to himself. Since history is traditionally written by the victors, did you want this book to challenge who gets to define success in historical narratives?
RP: I did, and also to consider what success is – who is defining it and what is their agenda – which is why I wanted us to hear from so many voices in varying positions of power, never being sure who has actually said what or why. Historical figures are often so reductively labelled (‘great’, ‘benevolent’, ‘mad’ etc.) but because my King has no defining quality, the humanness of him could rise to the surface.
The historical narrative was also very much informed by the present day, perhaps in ways I hadn’t expected when I embarked on the project. I did the bulk of the writing at a time of particular global horror – the ongoing genocide in Gaza with Netanyahu at the helm, backed by a cast of chilling supporters in Trump and Putin, and not least our own government. People living or dying in vast numbers at the press of a button, civilians just watching aghast – and was near constantly feeling utterly helpless in the face of it all. It was probably the first time in my life that I really understood we have been rendered powerless in the face of power; there was nothing anyone outside of a handful of people in the world could do, and the mechanisms we had been tricked into believing gave us a voice were shown up as a sham. It was horrifying, and as my King took form I just refused to allow him to become the kind of ruler who makes the news, or the history books. I had known from the start that he would be reluctant, afraid, squeamish, and also of great humanity, but he was certainly shaped in the shadows of that horror.
AO: Your prose possesses a striking lyrical precision; it is simultaneously playful and haunting, distilled and spacious, and deeply philosophical without being intimidating. Reading this book made me feel like I was holding something I’d be terrified to lose – it reminded me of the way poetry can anchor the intangible. How much do you think your background as a poet shaped and informed your narrative style?
RP: At this point I’m thinking that these questions are better written than the book itself! What a beautiful reflection.
Although I haven’t written poetry in a long time, I really do owe everything to it, and would never have been able to write this book without that background. Outside of a poet’s tendency for hyper fixation on words, images, rhythm, space, the line etc., and what other people may find an intolerable capacity for lack of clarity, it was actually the practice of writing poetry that carried me through. What I mean by that is that when you (or a least, I) start a poem you have no idea where it will end up; each line comes to you and it forms itself on the page. So I basically took that approach to the novel, not planning anything, not plotting a shape, and certainly not knowing how it would end. It’s the only way I know of writing and I think means you end up with something that aims to pin itself down at key moments at the same time as spending a lot of time in the vast grey between the black and white.
AO: Your novel offers a rich take on the human propensity for nostalgia, our desire to preserve the past, contrasted with our frequent blindness to the value of the present moment that is never coming back. Do you view art as the singular space where this contradiction dissolves, making it possible to cherish both past and present simultaneously?
RP: That’s such an interesting thought, but do you know what… I don’t know. That feels like something I could spend a lifetime thinking about and never find a satisfying answer.
AO: Thank you for this beautiful book and congratulations again on your win. What is next for you?
RP: Thank you! I very tentatively started a second novel before May We Feed the King came out and I really hope to be able to find my way further into that in good time. I also hope to enjoy this incredible good fortune as much as I can.
