Edward P. Jones to Receive Our 2026 Hadada Award by The Paris Review

In January 2002, Edward P. Jones was terminated Tax RecordsWeekly trade magazine for tax professionals. He suffered from depression, the latter of which was exacerbated by his upstairs neighbors, who were creating noise, as Jones told Hilton Als in Fiction Art No.222“I almost fell to my knees on the street corner, because I didn’t want to go home because of the noise.” The firing hurt, Jones recalled, “but I woke up the next day, Wednesday, and started working on the book. Maybe five pages that day because I had a plan—not because I knew what I had. Not at all. I mean, me being me, I lived in northern Virginia, I didn’t know what people wanted in New York, or wherever the publishing world was based. … I just had to move on. I was lucky, because I did things in the novel that I never knew that You shouldn’t do it.”

The result, Jones’ magisterial novel, Known Worldpublished in 2003, won the Pulitzer Prize. Set in antebellum Virginia, the novel focuses on a formerly enslaved man, Henry Townsend, who has become someone else’s slave—and expands to encompass the lives of several dozen interconnected characters, bouncing back and forth over decades and even centuries. Jones explores the limits of what we can know about other people’s motivations with a deep empathy that readers of his short stories—one of which was published in Paris Review in 1992. We are thrilled to announce that Jones will receive the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement, at Spring Joy on April 14, 2026.

Jones was born in 1950 in Washington, DC; he tells Als that he lived in eighteen different places in the city by the time he was eighteen. The nation’s capital has been an inspiration, its familiar geography the canvas for his first collection, Lost in the City (1992), in which streets, intersections, and buildings rarely go unnamed, giving the town the intimacy of a village for the shopkeepers, taxi drivers, gospel singers, children, and other residents who populate the story. “All place what I wrote was real,” Jones told Als in his interview. “I mean, the woman who went blind on the bus, I never knew anyone who experienced that. But I have to put him somewhere to stay, so I might as well put him in our Tenth Street apartment, in a building I know.”

In the “Marie,” which first appeared in Overviewan eighty-six year old woman embarks on a Sisyphean journey to retain her disability benefits from the Social Security Administration. “Nothing fit Marie’s theories about life like the weather in Washington,” Jones wrote. “Two days before, the temperature had been in the forties, and yesterday it dropped into the twenties, then warmed up a bit in the afternoon, causing snowfall. Today, the people on the radio said it would be warm enough to just wear a sweater, but Marie was wearing her coat.” In these pieces, Jones sheds light on the lives of people who lived in the shadow of power but received little protection, and on the skepticism and resilience that allowed them to press on, some of which reappears 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 most important authors to me. When I teach his stories, they are always a revelation to my students,” says Mona Simpson, author Overviewpublisher. “Jones writes from a place of depth and calm. There are no theatrical battles between good and evil, no crowd-pleasing happy endings. History may have placed his characters in their communities, limiting their freedom and opportunities, but within those communities, he shows a wide range of characters, 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 thrilled to present Hadada at Revel, our annual gathering of writers, artists, and friends to celebrate and raise funds for Overview501(c)(3) non-profit organization. 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 audio. We hope you will join We.