Percival Everett lives in Los Angeles, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California
He has been nominated for the Booker Prize twice – he was shortlisted for The Trees in 2022 and longlisted for James in 2024 – and is the author of over 30 published works. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Everett has won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Academy Award in Literature, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction. His 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into the Oscar-nominated major motion picture, American Fiction. In 2021, he received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
A captivating response to Mark Twain’s classic that is both a bold exploration of a dark chapter in history and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit
— The 2024 judges on James
Eerie, provocative, blackly comic Southern noir. A page-turner with a sharp, provocative edge, as it harks back to the real-life murder of the young Emmett Till, it has important things to say about race.
— The 2022 judges on The Trees
