The winners of the 2025 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday, with Percival Everett and Tessa Hulls among the authors honored in the award’s literary categories.
Everett won the fiction prize for James, his reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the point of view of the enslaved Jim. The novel previously won the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award, and it was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Hulls was named the winner in the memoir or autobiography category for Feeding Ghosts, which also won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. It is the second graphic memoir to win a Pulitzer Prize; Art Spiegelman’s Maus received a special citation in 1992.
Two books won in the history category: Edda L. Fields-Black’s Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War and Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations: A Millennium in North America. DuVal’s book previously won the Cundill History Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize.
Jason Roberts won the biography prize for Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, while Benjamin Nathans was named the winner in the general nonfiction category for To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. The poetry winner was Marie Howe for New and Selected Poems.
The Pulitzer Prizes, given annually by Columbia University, were established in 1917. Previous winners include Harper Lee for To Kill a Mockingbird, Hua Hsu for Stay True, and Manning Marable for Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. A full list of this year’s winners is available at the Pulitzer website.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
