Percival Everett talks to Ben Lawrence

Award-winning US novelist Percival Everett introduces his new novel, James, a moving and ferociously funny reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of and in the voice of the enslaved Jim.

James hides on Jackson’s Island when he hears he is about to be sold to a new owner and separated from his wife and daughter. Huckleberry Finn has faked his own death to escape a violent father. The two find themselves navigating treacherous waters on the Mississippi River. James emerges from the shadow of Huckleberry Finn to claim his own voice in Everett’s novel as he faces up to the burden he has to carry, the constant lie he has to live and the family he wants to protect.

Everett is author of more than 30 books and a leading light of US literature. He is a winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction and has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The Trees was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. The film American Fiction, which won an Oscar this year for best adapted screenplay, is based on his novel, Erasure. Everett is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Here he talks to Ben Lawrence, commissioning editor at The Telegraph.

Part of the festival’s programme of American literature and culture.