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For distinguished fiction published during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

James, by Percival Everett (Doubleday)

An accomplished reconsideration of “Huckleberry Finn” that gives agency to Jim to illustrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom.

Percival Everett accepts the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. (David Dini/The Pulitzer Prizes)

Winning Work

James

James by Percival Everett: 9780385550369 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER  • A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST FICTION BOOK OF THE LAST 30 YEARS

In development as a feature film to be produced by Steven Spielberg •  A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, TIME, and more.

“Genius”—The Atlantic • “A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own.”—Chicago Tribune • “A provocative, enlightening literary work of art.”—The Boston Globe • “Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful.”—The New York Times

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.  

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature. 

Biography

Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
 

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Fiction in 2025:

Gayl Jones

An ambitious and topsy-turvy vision of the segregated South, narrated by an Army veteran whose obsession with a sideshow attraction is presented in a swirl of memories and dreams, rich with literary allusions and jokes.

Rita Bullwinkel

About eight young women in a boxing tournament that examines the competitors’ personalities through their fighting styles, a taut narrative about the struggle to determine one’s own fate.

Stacey Levine

A novel set in the Cold War era about two orphaned half-sisters, a boarder, and the neighbors who surround them, a stylized and startling depiction of lives lived at a high pitch of emotion in the shadow of global catastrophe.

The Jury

Merve Emre(Chair)

Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism, Wesleyan University; Contributing Writer, The New Yorker

Laila Lalami

Novelist, Los Angeles

Jonathan Lethem

Roy Edward Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing, Pomona College

Ayana Mathis

Novelist; Distinguished Lecturer, Hunter College

Bryan Washington

Writer; Assistant Professor in Creative Writing, Rice University 

Winners in Fiction

Jayne Anne Phillips

A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.

Hernan Diaz

A riveting novel set in a bygone America that explores family, wealth and ambition through linked narratives rendered in different literary styles, a complex examination of love and power in a country where capitalism is king.

Joshua Cohen

A mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly-wound plot.

Louise Erdrich

A majestic, polyphonic novel about a community’s efforts to halt the proposed displacement and elimination of several Native American tribes in the 1950s, rendered with dexterity and imagination.

2025 Prize Winners

Staff of The Wall Street Journal

For chronicling political and personal shifts of the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, including his turn to conservative politics, his use of legal and illegal drugs and his private conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.