Percival Everett wins the National Book Award for his Huckleberry Finn-inspired epic “James.”

NEW YORK (AP) – Percival Everett’s “James,” a daring reworking of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” won the National Book Award for fiction. The winner in the nonfiction category was “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling” by Jason De León, while the finalists included Salman Rushdie’s memoir about his brutal stabbing in 2022, “The Knife.”

The youth literature prize was awarded Wednesday night to Shifa Saltaga Safadi’s coming-of-age story “Kareem Between,” and the poetry prize was awarded to Lena Khalaf Tuffah’s “Something About Living.” In the translation category, the winner was “Taiwan Travel Diary” by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King.

Evaluation panels composed of writers, critics, booksellers and other representatives of the literary community chosen from lots of of submitted entries, and publishers nominated a complete of over 1,900 books. Each of the winners of the five competitive categories received $10,000.

Everett’s victory continues his remarkable development over the past few years. Little known to readers for many years, the 67-year-old was a finalist for the Booker and Pulitzer Prizes for such novels as “Trees” and “Dr. No” and the novel “Erasure” was adapted into the Oscar-nominated “American Fiction”.

Continuing Mark Twain’s classic about the wayward Southern boy, Huck, and the enslaved Jim, Everett tells the story from the latter’s perspective and highlights how in another way Jim acts and even speaks when whites usually are not around. The novel was a finalist for the Booker and won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction last month.

“James was well received,” Everett noted during his speech.

Demon Copperhead novelist Barbara Kingsolver and Black Classic Press publisher W. Paul Coates received Lifetime Achievement Medals from the National Book Foundation, which awards the awards.

Speakers praised diversity, disruption and autonomy, whether it was Taiwanese independence or immigrant rights in the US. The two winners, Safadi and Tuffaha, condemned the years-long war in Gaza and U.S. military support for Israel. Neither mentioned Israel by name, but each called the conflict “genocide” and were met with cheers – and more subdued reactions – after calling for support for the Palestinians.

Tuffaha, who’s Palestinian-American, dedicated her award partly to “all the incredibly beautiful Palestinians this world has lost, and all the wonderful ones who survive, waiting for us, waiting for us to wake up.”

Last yr, publisher Zibby Owens withdrew support for the awards after learning that the finalists planned to sentence the war in Gaza. This yr, the World Jewish Congress was amongst critics of Coates’ award, citing partly his reissue of the essay “The Jewish Onslaught,” which was called anti-Semitic.

National Book Foundation executive director Ruth Dickey said in a recent statement that Coates was being honored for his body of labor, not for any single book, and added that while the foundation condemns anti-Semitism and other types of bigotry, it also believes in free speech.

“Anyone who looks at the work of any publisher over the course of almost fifty years will find individual works or opinions with which they disagree or find offensive,” she added.

The National Book Awards took place way back in mid-November, shortly after the election, and supply an early glimpse of the book world’s response: hopeful in the wake of Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, when publisher and honorary winner Barney Rosset predicted a “new and uplifting program.” ; grim but determined in 2016, after Donald Trump’s first victory, when fiction winner Colson Whitehead urged viewers to “be kind to everyone, make art and fight power.”

This yr, as lots of gathered for a dinner ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in downtown Manhattan to have a good time the seventy fifth anniversary of the awards, the mood was certainly one of sobriety, determination and goodwill.

Host Kate McKinnon joked that she was hired because the National Book Foundation wanted “something fun and light to distract from the fact that the world is a bonfire.” Musical guest Jon Batiste led the crowd in a round of “When the Saints Go Marching In” and sang a couple of lines from “Hallelujah,” the Leonard Cohen standard that McKinnon somberly performed at the starting of the first “Saturday Night Live” after the 2016 election.

Kingsolver admitted that she feels “depressed at the moment”, but added that she has faced despair before. She compared truth and like to natural forces equivalent to gravity and the sun, that are at all times present whether you may see them or not. The screenwriter’s job is to assume “a better ending than the one we were given,” she said.

During Tuesday evening’s reading by the award finalists, some spoke of community and support. Everett began his turn by confessing that he really “needed this kind of inspiration after the last few weeks. In a way, we need each other. After warning that “hope just isn’t a technique,” he paused and said, “Never has a situation seemed so absurd, surreal and ridiculous.”

It took him a moment to understand that he wasn’t discussing current events, but fairly was reading James.