Percival Everett wins 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Mark Twain-inspired novel James
American author Percival Everett's novel James, his radical reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved title character, has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
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.
This past summer the novel was on former U.S. president Barack Obama's summer reading list for 2024.
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.
