Skip to main content
Author Percival Everett

Percival Everett

Connect

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 shortlisted 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

A Q&A with Percival Everett

Watch our film

Read more on Percival Everett

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

Watch our videos

Percival Everett answers readers' questions about 'The Trees' | The Booker Prize

David Harewood reads a second extract from 'The Trees' | The Booker Prize

David Harewood reads from 'The Trees' by Percival Everett | The Booker Prize

All nominated books

James by Percival Everett
A profound meditation on identity, belonging and the sacrifices we make to protect the ones we love, which reimagines Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Trees by Percival Everett
A violent history refuses to be buried in Percival Everett’s striking novel, which combines an unnerving murder mystery with a powerful condemnation of racism and police violence