Percival Everett wins 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Mark Twain-inspired novel James
Everett's Pulitzer confirmed the million-selling James as the most celebrated and popular U.S. literary novel of 2024, and accelerated the 68-year-old author's remarkable rise after decades of being little known to the general public.
Since 2021, he has won the PEN/Jean Stein Award for Dr. No, was a Pulitzer finalist for Telephone and on the Booker shortlist for The Trees.
Everett's novel, a dramatic reworking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, already has won the National Book Award. It was also a Booker finalist and won the Kirkus Prize for fiction.
The Pulitzer citation called James an "accomplished reconsideration" that illustrates "the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom."
Everett said in a statement that he was "shocked and pleased, but mostly shocked. This is a wonderful honour."
Marie Howe's New and Selected Poems won for poetry. The Pulitzer for autobiography went to Tessa Hulls' multigenerational Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, her first book.
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