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Percival Everett wins National Book Award for fiction with retelling of Huckleberry Finn

Percival Everett has won the $10,000 National Book Award for fiction, one of the US’s most prestigious literary prizes, for James, his acclaimed reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The 67-year-old author was also shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize for James, which focuses on Huckleberry Finn’s enslaved character Jim. The Guardian’s Anthony Cummins called the book “gripping, painful, funny, horrifying” in his review.

Everett, whose previous novel Erasure was adapted into the Oscar-winning 2023 comedy American Fiction, saw off competition from Miranda July’s All Fours, Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel Martyr!, Pemi Aguda’s short story collection Ghostroots and Hisham Matar’s My Friends in his category.

“Two weeks ago, I was feeling pretty low,” Everett told the audience at the NBA ceremony in New York on Wednesday night, alluding to the US election result. “And to tell the truth, I still feel pretty low. And 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 that hope really is no substitute for strategy.”

In other categories, MacArthur fellow Jason De León won the $10,000 nonfiction category for his book Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling. De León was up against Salman Rushdie, who was nominated for his first National Book Award for his bestselling memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.

A year after sponsors withdrew from the NBAs when the finalists banded together to issue a statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, many of this year’s winners used their speeches to call for peace in the Middle East.

Palestinian American poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, who won the $10,000 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.”

She spoke of her father, who was born in Palestine in 1938. “He sat me down at age five and told me the story of the homeland he couldn’t live in any more, and that story has carried me through my entire life, has driven me, has motivated me.”

Shifa Saltagi Safadi won the $10,000 young people’s literature category for her novel Kareem Between, about a Syrian American boy whose mother is trapped in Syria by Donald Trump’s travel ban, which was imposed on countries with mostly Muslim populations in 2017 and lifted by Joe Biden in 2021. Before he was re-elected, Trump said he would bring the ban back, and ban refugees from Gaza.

“It’s not historical fiction any more … our work did not stop in 2020. Dehumanising of Arabs, and Islamophobia, has been rising more than ever in this past year to justify a genocide of the Palestinian people,” Safadi told the room.

The $10,000 translated literature prize was won by Taiwan Travelogue author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King, who translated the book from Mandarin Chinese.

Publisher W Paul Coates, the father of famed author Ta-Nehisi Coates, won the literarian award, a lifetime achievement prize for outstanding service to the literary community. Coates founded the Black Classic Press in 1978 in Baltimore, originally working from the basement of his house. Black Classic Press is now one of the oldest independently owned Black publishers in the US.

Author Barbara Kingsolver won the distinguished contribution to American letters award, which has previously been won by Toni Morrison and Isabella Allende. The author of nine novels, including The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna and Demon Copperhead, Kingsolver has written works spanning nonfiction, poetry, journalism and science writing.