Edward P. Jones

Edward Paul Jones (born Washington, D.C., 1950) is an American novelist and short story writer known for fiction about the African-American experience. Writing in English, he gained wide recognition with The Known World, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

He grew up in poor neighborhoods of the capital, raised largely by a mother who was illiterate and who worked as a domestic. After his father left, the family moved again and again. Following his mother's death in 1975, he spent several years unemployed and without a stable home. He later studied English at the College of the Holy Cross and earned a master's in creative writing at the University of Virginia, then worked for nearly two decades writing and editing about economic issues.

His debut, Lost in the City (1992), gathers stories set in the Washington neighborhoods of his childhood, far from the city of monuments and postcards. The Known World (2003) moved to pre-war Virginia, examining free Black people who owned enslaved people. His third book, All Aunt Hagar's Children (2006), revisits minor characters from the first and is linked to it story by story. His legacy lies in bringing overlooked urban life and the history of slavery into contemporary American fiction.