Pulitzer-winning novel ‘James’ is up for another major honor
Jul 14, 2025, 7:57 AM
This combination of images shows cover art for "James" by Percival Everett, left, and "John Lewis: A Life" by David Greenberg. (Doubleday/Simon & Schuster via AP)
Credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS
(Doubleday/Simon & Schuster via AP)
NEW YORK (AP) — Percival Everett ‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “James” is up for another literary honor.
Everett’s dramatic retelling of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is a fiction nominee for the 20th annual Dayton Literary Peace Prize, which comes with a $10,000 cash award. Besides the Pulitzer, “James” has also won the National Book Award and Kirkus Prize.
David Greenberg’s “ congressman, is a nonfiction finalist, the Dayton prize foundation announced Thursday.
Winners in both categories will be announced in September.
The other fiction contenders are Priscilla Morris’ “Black Butterflies,” Alejandro Puyana’s “Freedom Is a Feast,” Kristin Hannah’s “ The Women,” Helen Benedict’s “The Good Deed” and Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr!”
Besides “John Lewis,” the nonfiction nominees are Sunil Amrith’s “The Burning Earth,” Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor’s “Solidarity,” Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War,” Lauren Markham’s “A Map of Future Ruins” and Wendy Pearlman’s “The Home I Worked to Make.”
Established in 1995 and named for the historic agreements that ended the war in Bosnia, the Dayton prizes are given to authors whose “work demonstrates the power of the written word to foster peace.”
Previous winners include Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Sympathizer,”Edwidge Danticat ’s “Brother, I’m Dying” and Ta-Nehisi Coates ’ “We Were Eight Years in Power.”
