Percival Everett's James Wins 2025 Pulitzer Prize For Fiction

2025 Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction - James by Percival Everett

On May 5 Columbia University announced the 2025 Pulitzer Prizes, awarded on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

While our congratulations go to 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners in Journalism, we, as usual, focus on the category of Books, Drama and Music. After snatching the National Book Award for Fiction, Percival Everett's James has also got a Pulitzer for Fiction, being acknowledged as "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."

Here is the complete list of winners:

Fiction

James, by Percival Everett

Finalists:

Headshot: A Novel, by Rita Bullwinkel

Mice 1961, by Stacey Levine

The Unicorn Woman, by Gayl Jones

Drama

Purpose, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Finalists:

Oh, Mary!, by Cole Escola

The Ally, by Itamar Moses

History (2 Prizes)

Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War, by Edda L. Fields-Black

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, by Kathleen DuVal

Finalist:

Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, by Seth Rockman

Biography

Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, by Jason Roberts

Finalists:

John Lewis: A Life, by David Greenberg

The World She Edited: Katherine S. White at The New Yorker, by Amy Reading

Memoir or Autobiography

Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, by Tessa Hulls

Finalists:

Fi: A Memoir of My Son, by Alexandra Fuller

I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, by Lucy Sante

Poetry

New and Selected Poems, by Marie Howe

Finalists:

An Authentic Life, by Jennifer Chang

Bluff: Poems, by Danez Smith

General Nonfiction

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, by Benjamin Nathans

Finalists:

I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India, by Rollo Romig

Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, by Rachel Nolan

Music

Sky Islands, by Susie Ibarra

Finalists:

Jim is Still Crowing, by Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson

The Comet, by George Lewis

Source: The 2025 Pulitzer Prize annoucement