Edward P. Jones, the New York Times bestselling author, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World; he also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004. His first collection of stories, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short listed for the National Book Award. His second collection, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award. He has been an instructor of fiction writing at a range of universities, including Princeton. He lives in Washington, D.C.
He won both the Pen/Hemingway Award and the Lannan Foundation Grant for his first book, Lost in the City, a collection of short stories on the African American working class of the 20th century Washington, D.C. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2005 Jones was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
His second book, The Known World, is a richly imagined novel set before the Civil War in Virginia. It examines issues regarding the ownership of black slaves by free black people as well as by whites. A book with many points of view, The Known World paints an enormous canvas thick with personalities and situations that show how slavery destroys but can also be transcended. It won the National Book Award in 2004 and subsequently won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Jones's third book, All Aunt Hagar's Children, was published in 2006. Like Lost in the City, it is a collection of short stories that deal with the African-Americans revolving around Washington, D.C. Several of the stories had been previously published in The New Yorker magazine. The stories in the book take up the lives of ancillary characters in Lost in the City.