American author Percival Everett’s James, a daring reworking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has won the U.S.-based National Book Award for fiction.
The annual literary award program celebrates and honours authors for books published in the United States roughly during the award year.
American writer Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings won for nonfiction, where finalists included Salman Rushdie’s memoir about his brutal stabbing in 2022, Knife.
The prize for young people’s literature was given on Nov. 20 to Shifa Saltagi Safadi’s coming of age story Kareem Between.
The poetry award went to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something About Living. Canadian poet and academic Anne Carson was shortlisted for her book, Wrong Norma, a collection of prose pieces greatly varying in subject matter.
The only two-time winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetry, Carson is the author of Autobiography of Red, Antigonick and Red Doc>. She has also won a Guggenheim, a Lannan Foundation fellowship, a MacArthur “genius grant” and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.
In the translation category, the winner was Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue, translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King.
Judging panels, made up of writers, critics, booksellers and others in the literary community, made their selections from hundreds of submissions, with publishers nominating more than 1,900 books in all. Each of the winners in the five competitive categories received U.S. $10,000 ($13,970.25 Cdn).
Everett’s win continues his remarkable rise in the past few years. Little known to general readers for decades, the 67-year-old has been a Booker Prize and Pulitzer Prize finalist for such novels as The Trees and Dr. No and has seen the novel Erasure adapted into the Oscar-nominated American Fiction.
In taking on Mark Twain’s classic about the wayward Southern boy Huck and the enslaved Jim, Everett tells the story from the latter’s perspective and emphasizes how differently Jim behaves and even speaks when whites are not around.
Writers and Company1:00:29Percival Everett’s The Trees imagines a world where the horrors of lynching are avenged
In 1955, the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi brought nationwide attention to racial violence and injustice. The perpetrators were never punished. But in Percival Everett’s powerful new novel, The Trees, that history comes back to haunt Money’s white townsfolk, in a wave of retribution for the brutal legacy of lynching in the American South.
The novel was a Booker finalist and last month won the Kirkus Prize for fiction. This past summer the novel was on former U.S. president Barack Obama’s summer reading list for 2024.
“James has been nicely received,” Everett noted during his acceptance speech.
Demon Copperhead novelist Barbara Kingsolver and Black Classic Press publisher W. Paul Coates also received lifetime achievement medals from the National Book Foundation, which presents the awards.
With files from CBC Books
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