Percival Everett's "James," a daring reworking of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," has won the National Book Award for fiction. Jason De Leon's "Soldiers and Kings Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling" 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 Wednesday night to Shifa Saltagi Safadi's coming of age story "Kareem Between," and the poetry award went to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's "Something About Living." In the translation category, the winner was Yang Shuang-zi'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 10,000.
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 "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. The novel was a Booker finalist and last month won the Kirkus Prize for fiction.
