Last year’s winner, The Artist by Lucy Steeds, went on to be Waterstones’ August Fiction Book Of The Month.
A book hailed as a “wildly original and moving reflection on history” has been named as the winner of the 2026 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.
May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry won the annual award during an evening ceremony at Waterstones’ flagship shop in London’s Piccadilly area on Thursday, topping a shortlist of six books.
Bea Carvalho, Waterstones’ head of books, said: “We are delighted to announce that Waterstones booksellers have named Rebecca Perry the winner of the 2026 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.
“From a shortlist of six stunning debuts, May We Feed the King stood out for its crisp, cool prose and its playfully enigmatic approach to storytelling.
“With a poet’s eye for detail and a keen sense of humour, Perry grapples with the slippery nature of memory and the burden of power. To read May We Feed the King is to creep behind the scenes of a museum and witness its exhibits come to life.
“It is a delicious and dream-like tale steeped in curiosity and nostalgia, and a heartfelt ode to history and its custodians. Rebecca Perry is an author to be seriously excited about and we can’t wait to see what she does next.”
London-born Perry has previously authored two poetry collections in Beauty/Beauty and Stone Fruit, as well as On Trampolining, a work of creative non-fiction.
Perry said of May We Feed The King: “In writing this book, I wanted to press at the edges of both historical fiction as a genre, and how we narrate history, testing what gives and what holds.
“But I also wanted to explore the capacities of loneliness and imagination, and ultimately what happens when a person defies what is expected of them, refusing to step into the tyranny of power.”
For winning, Perry takes home £5,000 and Waterstones’ promise to commit to her writing career.
The prize’s organisers say the book’s story “moves playfully between a curator in the present day, and the medieval king whose rooms she is recreating”.
The other shortlisted books were Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash, Honey In The Wound by Jiyoung Han, Under Water by Tara Menon, A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia, and The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski.
Last year’s winner, The Artist by Lucy Steeds, went on to be Waterstones’ August Fiction Book Of The Month and concluded 2025 being crowned Waterstones Book of the Year.
