The Trees wins top comic fiction prize

Percival Everett takes the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse title

Percival Everett has won this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with his novel The Trees.

The book – which was also shortlisted for The Booker Prize – revolves around a series of murders in rural Mississippi that carry echoes of harrowing events from 65 years ago.

Confronting America’s legacy of lynching, the award organisers described as ‘a bold and provocative book in which Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can't look away.’ They add: ‘It is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance, whilst at the same time a comic horror masterpiece.’

Los Angeles-based Everett said: "I am indeed flattered and honoured by the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, if for no other reason because the name is so long.

‘I looked back at past winners to see that I am in fine and fancy company. It's ironic that this prize for comedy goes now to a book about the American practice of lynching, but that's why I love comedy. Comedy allows us for short bursts to be smarter animals than we usually are. To realise the absurdity is to transcend the absurdity. Funny that. Thank you.’

Peter Florence, chair of the judges, said: ‘Comedy can entertain, can mock, can tease out our compassion and empathy, it can make you laugh and smile and feel better about other people and even ourselves.

‘And Percival Everett’s The Trees can do something else as well. It can lighten the most atrocious darkness and tell truths in ways that begin to make sense of the absurdity of life. He brings us back to the core of our own humanity.

‘You have to go back to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 to find this done so well as Percival Everett does it. He’s in that company with Heller and Swift, with Chaplin, Pryor and with Wodehouse. What a joy to read such a book.’

As winner, Everett receives a jeroboam of Bollinger champagne, and 52 volumes of the Everyman Wodehouse edition – while a Gloucestershire Old Spots pig is named after the winning novel.

The other 2022 shortlisted titles were: Again, Rachel by Marian Keyes, Are We Having Fun Yet? by Lucy Mangan, Harrow by Joy Williams, Impossible by Sarah Lotz, Last Resort by Andrew Lipstein, One Day I Shall Astonish The World by Nina Stibbe, Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart, The Echo Chamber by John Boyne, The Lock In by Phoebe Luckhurst, The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman and The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris