Percival Everett has won the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel “James,” a retelling of Mark Twain’s classic “Huckleberry Finn.”
Published in March to widespread critical acclaim,“James” is told from the perspective of Jim, the escaped slave who joins Twain’s protagonist Huckleberry Finn on his journey down the Mississippi River. The novel won the Kirkus Prize in October and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, whose judges called the novel “a bold exploration of a dark chapter in history and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.”
“I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have written,” Everett said in an August interview with the Booker Prize Foundation. “I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain.”
Accepting the honor at Wednesday’s National Book Awards Ceremony in New York, Everett — whose previous novel, “Erasure,” was adapted into the Oscar-winning 2023 comedy “American Fiction” — remarked that despite “feeling pretty low” in recent weeks, “As I look out at this, so much excitement about books, I have to say I do feel some hope.”
“But it’s important to remember,” the USC professor of English continued, “that hope really is no substitute for strategy.”
Last year, the National Book Awards lost several sponsors, including subscription service Book of the Month, after 20 finalists took the stage during the ceremony to call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
This year’s winners made similarly impassioned speeches calling for peace in the Middle East.
Arab American poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, who won in the poetry category for her collection “Something About Living,” said, “We are now living in the second November of the American-funded genocide in Palestine. I hope that every one of us can love ourselves enough to stand up and to make it stop.”
Shifa Saltagi Safadi won in the young people’s literature category for her novel “Kareem Between,” about a Syrian American boy whose mother is trapped in Syria by then-President Trump’s yearslong travel ban. She said stories like hers are “not historical fiction anymore.”
“Until we have solved the problems of death and loneliness and their byproducts, war and climate change,” said Kate McKinnon, the ceremony’s host , “sensitive souls will continue to offer their theses of how to make the most of our fragile and fleeting time on this burning planet surrounded by other frightened hearts.”
“And in that way, writing a book is nothing short of an act of kindness,” the “SNL” alumna added.
Also among Wednesday’s honorees were Jason De León, for his nonfiction book “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” and Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, winning the translated literature category for “Taiwan Travelogue.”
Author Barbara Kingsolver won the award for distinguished contribution to American letters, which has previously been won by writers including Toni Morrison and Isabel Allende, while publisher W. Paul Coates — the father of author Ta-Nehisi Coates — won the 2024 Literarian Award, a lifetime achievement prize for outstanding service to the literary community. The elder Coates in 1978 founded the Black Classic Press, now one of the oldest independently owned Black publishers in the country.