Novelist Percival Everett and playwright Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins among Pulitzer winners in the arts

NEW YORK – Percival Everett's caller "James,” his extremist re-imagining of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the position of the enslaved rubric character, has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. “Purpose,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ drawing-room play astir an accomplished Black household destroying itself from within, won for drama. It besides earned six Tony Award nominations past week.

Everett’s Pulitzer confirmed “James” arsenic the astir celebrated U.S. literate caller of 2024, and accelerated the 68-year-old author’s singular emergence aft decades of being small known to the wide public. Since 2021, helium has won the PEN/Jean Stein Award for “Dr. No,” was a Pulitzer finalist for “Telephone” and connected the Booker shortlist for “The Trees.” Before Monday, “James” already had won the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize and the Carnegie Medal for fiction. His radical and publishing satire “Erasure,” released successful 2001, was adapted into the Oscar-nominated 2023 movie “American Fiction.”

The Pulitzer citation called “James” an “accomplished reconsideration” that illustrates “the absurdity of radical supremacy and supply a caller instrumentality connected the hunt for household and freedom.”

“Purpose” was praised successful its citation arsenic “a skillful blend of play and drama that probes however antithetic generations specify heritage.” Jacobs-Jenkins had been doubly nominated for a play Pulitzer, for “Everybody” successful 2018 and “Gloria” successful 2016. He won the Tony Award for best play revival past year for “Appropriate,” a enactment centered connected a household reunion successful Arkansas wherever everyone has competing motivations and grievances. He is connected the big committee of this year’s Met Gala.

Also Monday, Pulitzer officials announced that Jason Roberts won the biography grant for “Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life” and Benjamin Nathans' "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement" had been cited for wide nonfiction. Two books were announced arsenic past winners, some of them, similar “James” and “Purpose,” explorations of contention successful U.S. past and culture: 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 successful North America."

Marie Howe's “New and Selected Poems” won for poetry, and composer-percussionist Susie Ibarra's “Sky Islands,” an eight-piece ensemble inspired by the rainforest habitats of Luzon, Philippines, was awarded the Pulitzer for music.

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AP Entertainment Writer Mark Kennedy contributed to this report.

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