Photograph by Hilton Als.

In January 2002, Edward P. Jones was laid off from Tax Notes, a weekly trade magazine for tax professionals. He had been suffering from spells of depression, the latest one exacerbated by his upstairs neighbors, who created such a ruckus that, as Jones told Hilton Als in The Art of Fiction No. 222, “I almost fell to my knees at the corner of my street, because I just didn’t want to go back home to the noise.” The firing hurt, Jones recalled, “but I got up the next day, Wednesday, and went to work on the book. Probably five pages that day because I had a plan—not because I knew what I had. Not at all. I mean, I’m me, I’m living in northern Virginia, I don’t know what people want in New York, or wherever the publishing world is centered. … I just had to go on. I’m lucky, because I did things in that novel that I never learned you’re not supposed to do.”

The result, Jones’s magisterial novel, The Known World, published in 2003, won the Pulitzer Prize. Set in antebellum Virginia, the novel focuses on a formerly enslaved man, Henry Townsend, who has become an enslaver of others—and expands to take in the lives of several dozen interconnected characters, shuttling back and forth across decades and even centuries. Jones traces the limits of what we can know about the motivations of others with an immersive empathy recognizable to readers of his short stories—one of which was published in The Paris Review in 1992. We are thrilled to announce that Jones will receive the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement, at the Spring Revel on April 14, 2026. 

Jones was born in 1950 in Washington, D.C.; he told Als that he lived in eighteen different places in the city by the time he was eighteen. The nation’s capital has been a muse, its familiar geography the canvas for his first collection, Lost in the City (1992), in which streets, intersections, and buildings rarely go unnamed, lending the city the intimacy of a village for the shopkeepers, taxi drivers, gospel singers, children, and other citizens who populate the stories. “All the places that I write about are real,” Jones told Als in his interview. “I mean, the woman who becomes blind on the bus, I never knew anybody that happened to. But I had to put her someplace to live, so I might as well put her in our Tenth Street apartment, in a building that I knew.”

In “Marie,” which first appeared in the Review, an eighty-six-year-old woman embarks on a Sisyphean journey to maintain her disability benefits from the Social Security Administration. “Nothing fit Marie’s theory about life like the weather in Washington,” Jones writes. “Two days before, the temperature had been in the forties, and yesterday it had dropped to the low twenties, then warmed up a bit with the afternoon, bringing on snow flurries. Today the weather people on the radio had said it would warm up enough to wear just a sweater, but Marie was wearing her coat.” In such passages, Jones sheds light on the lives of people who reside in the shadow of power but receive few of its protections, and on the knowing skepticism and endurance that enable them to go on, some reappearing in his second collection, All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006).

“For a long time, Edward P. Jones has been one of the two or three writers most important to me. When I teach his stories, they always turn out to be a revelation to my students,” says Mona Simpson, the Review’s publisher. “Jones writes from a deep, still place. There are no theatrical battles between good and evil, no crowd-pleasing happy endings. History may have settled his characters in their communities, delimiting their freedom and opportunities, but within those communities, he shows an infinite variety of character, complex greed and cruelty, but also so much tenderness and reprieve.”

Jones is currently a professor of English at George Washington University. He is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a PEN/Malamud Award, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. We are tremendously excited to present him with the Hadada at the Revel, our annual gathering of writers, artists, and friends to celebrate and raise funds for the Review, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Tickets are now available, and all proceeds from the event will help us continue to seek out the best new work and share it with readers in print, online, and on audio. We hope you’ll join us.