The bath is perhaps the last place you’d expect to find an author toiling away on their first novel, but that’s exactly where writer Rebecca Perry wrote her debut fiction May We Feed the King.
“I would write in the bath after work,” she recalled this week, at a Waterstones event celebrating the book shop’s 2026 Debut Fiction Prize. “I had a wooden tray that constricted me, it’s quite uncomfortable physically!”
Perry, whose novel follows a museum curator who becomes deeply entangled in the life of a reluctant medieval king, was one of a group of emerging, shortlisted authors speaking at the event.
For Lost Lambs author Madeline Cash, writing was like scratching an itch. Her novel is about the dysfunctional Flynn family as they navigate an open marriage and endless conspiracy theories. It came together over the span of a year and a half during evenings, weekends and “any scrap of time” she could find alongside her main job as co-founder of Forever magazine. She admitted: “I’ve always just needed to do this, so it wasn’t a labour. It’s definitely joyful and cathartic.”
Lost Lambs has recently been optioned for a limited series by A24, the indie film company behind Oscar-winning films from Moonlight to Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Korean author Han Jiyoung’s process was more emotionally driven. Her novel, Honey in the Wound, follows the story of a “comfort woman”, which is the term for women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces in the 1930s. It explores what it means to be a woman challenging institutions and rewriting buried history.
“I literally rage-wrote this,” she said, “and I was racing against this morbid countdown of [comfort] women in their nineties passing away.”
“I wanted to use [the book] to amplify the agency of ordinary women in particular,” she said.
Tara Menon, author of Under Water, was also spurred on by feelings of anger at the disparity between humanitarian responses after 2012’s hurricane Sandy in the US and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
“The disparity between which deaths get mourned and for how long made me really angry,” she said.
It was this frustration that fuelled more than eight years of research into the disasters, which underpins her novel.
Much like Menon, Angela Tomaski’s novel The Infamous Gilberts was a labour of love. Having made several false starts over the past two decades, she had to wait for all the characters to fully form in her mind before she could properly tell the story she imagined. After this quiet, 20-year period of thinking, she completed the first draft in an astonishing three months.
![The shortlisted authors [left to right]: Madeleine Cash, Rebecca Perry, Angela Tomaski, Han Jiyoung, Tara Menon (Waterstones)](https://static.independent.co.uk/2026/07/15/14/40/Event-pic-2.jpg)
But early drafts, of course, are not the final hurdle, as they often undergo enormous changes. For Cash, Lost Lambs wasn’t originally supposed to be a social polemic, but she couldn’t keep out the broader social commentary that is now essential to the novel’s success. She joked that her editors also had “lots of spelling mistakes to fix”.
Sometimes personal sacrifices are also necessary. “I have a very boring real life,” claimed Tomaski, explaining that she needed to steer clear of any distractions so she could commit herself to the world of the Gilberts and the crumbling Gothic mansion of Thornwalk.
Saying goodbye to the first draft can be a bittersweet feeling. “I felt really sad when it was gone,” admitted Perry, while Han added that novel writing can be a “madness inducing exercise”.
Stephanie Sy-Quia, who is shortlisted, was not present at the event. Her book A Private Man follows a forbidden romance between a 1950s Catholic priest and the woman he eventually marries. The story was inspired by Sy-Quia’s own grandparents.
The Waterstone’s Debut Fiction Prize will be revealed on the evening of Thursday 16 July, with the winner joining a suite of critically acclaimed new authors who are reshaping the contemporary literary space.
