History is ‘mostly artifice’: Rebecca Perry, author of Booker-shortlisted ‘May We Feed the King’

Interview “Teasing out life in a dead space, though possible, is akin to making an animal from a folded paper napkin.” There is something deceptive about mistaking a folded napkin for an animal. And yet, in a world inundated by ‘constructed realities’ for social media, the greater challenge may be holding on to the capacity to believe.

London-based poet Rebecca Perry, the only debut novelist on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist, compels us to do that with May We Feed the King (Granta Books). A genre-bending novel that Perry initially imagined as a “long poem”, even before writing a word of it, the book brings together an unlikely pair: a modern-day curator intent on recreating historical banquets through painstakingly sourced replica food, and a reluctant king who is watched at all hours of the day, powerless despite his position at the apex of a medieval kingdom.

Perry creates a plot, and still inscribes gaps between what is seen and what is believed, what is staged and what is real.