Everett wins Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with 'powerful' The Trees

Percival Everett has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction for his “powerful and important” novel The Trees, published by Influx Press.  

Now in its 22nd year, the award is the UK’s longest running prize for comic fiction and is designed to highlight the funniest novel of the past 12 months, which best evokes the Wodehouse spirit of “witty characters and perfectly-timed comic phrases”. 

The announcement was made this evening (22nd November) at a ceremony held at the Bollinger Burlington Bar in London. Everett receives a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année, the complete set of the Everyman’s Library P G Wodehouse collection and a pig named after his winning book. 

Described by the New Yorker as “at once hilarious and horrifying” and by the Daily Telegraph as “satire in the great tradition of Swift by way of ‘South Park’”, organisers praised The Trees 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 added: “Confronting America’s legacy of lynching, it is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance, while at the same time a comic horror masterpiece.” 

Everett, who has written nearly 30 books, 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, added: “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. And yes, I’ve written out Chapter 64 by hand, in pencil." 

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