Percival Everett wins the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction for James
Percival Everett's James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's point of view, has won the US National Book Award for Fiction.
Percival Everett has won the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction for James. The award was announced at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York on 20 November 2024.
James retells Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who travels with Huck. The other fiction finalists were Pemi Aguda's Ghostroots, Miranda July's All Fours, Hisham Matar's My Friends and a novel by Kaveh Akbar. In the UK the book is published by Mantle, and it was on the 2024 Booker Prize shortlist.
Other winners on the night included Lena Khalaf Tuffaha for poetry, Jason De León for non-fiction, Shifa Saltagi Safadi for young people's literature, and Yang Shuang-zi's Taiwan Travelogue, translated from Mandarin by Lin King, for translated literature. Barbara Kingsolver received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Why it matters: James is a prominent example of a novel that answers a canonical text directly, and its success on both sides of the Atlantic shows how much room there is for that kind of retelling when it offers a genuinely different point of view.
Sources: Wikipedia: 2024 National Book Awards; Pan Macmillan: Percival Everett's James wins the Pulitzer Prize.