Percival Everett, Jason de Leon selected as winners of 2024 National Book Awards

• Percival Everett won the National Book Award for Fiction with “James,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” told from Jim’s point of view.
• Jason DeLeon’s “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Trafficking” won in the non-fiction category.
• Winners were chosen from more than 1,900 nominated books by panels of authors, critics and booksellers.

Percival Everett’s “James,” a daring reimagining of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” won the National Book Award for fiction. Jason de Leon’s “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Trafficking” won for nonfiction, where finalists included Salman Rushdie’s 2022 memoir about his brutal stabbing, “Knife.”

The youth literature prize was awarded on Wednesday night to Shifa Saltagi Safadi’s coming-of-age story “Between Love” and the poetry award to Lena Khalaf Tofaha’s “Something About Living.” In the translation category, the winner was “Taiwan Itinerary” by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin Qing.

Judging panels made up of authors, critics, booksellers and other members of the literary community made their selections from hundreds of submissions, with publishers nominating more than 1,900 books in total. Winners in five competitive categories each received $10,000.

Judy Bloom, American Library Association, won the National Book Critics Circle Awards

Everett’s winning streak has continued his impressive rise over the past few years. Little known to the general reader for decades, Booker, 67, has been a Booker Prize and Pulitzer Prize finalist for novels such as “Trees” and “Doctor No.” is “American Fiction.”

Adapting Mark Twain’s classic about the wayward Southern boy Huck and the slave Jim, Everett tells the story from the latter’s point of view and emphasizes how Jim behaves differently and Even when whites aren’t there, it speaks. The novel was a Booker finalist and won the Crux Prize for Fiction last month.

“‘James’ has been well received,” Everett noted during his acceptance speech.

“Demon Copperhead” novelist Barbara Kingsolver and Black Classic Press publisher W. Paul Coates received lifetime achievement medals from the National Book Foundation, which presents the awards.

Speakers praised diversity, disruption and sovereignty, whether Taiwan’s independence or immigrant rights in the U.S. Two winners, Safadi and Tafaha, condemned the year-old Gaza war and U.S. military support for Israel. Neither mentioned Israel by name, but both were met with cheers — and more muted reactions — after calling the conflict “genocide” and calling for support for the Palestinians.

Tufaha, who is Palestinian-American, named her award in part “to all the beautiful Palestinians that this world has lost and to all the miraculous people who have been patient, waiting for us, waiting for us to wake up.” “What?”

Last year, publisher Zebi Owens withdrew support for the awards after hearing that finalists were planning to condemn the Gaza war. This year the World Jewish Congress was among those who criticized Coates’ award, citing the reissue of his essay “The Jewish Insult,” which has been called anti-Semitic.

Ruth Dickey, executive director of the National Book Foundation, said in a recent statement that Coates was being honored for a work rather than an individual book, adding that the foundation condemns anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry. , she also believes in freedom of expression. .

“A reviewer of any publisher’s work over nearly five decades will find individual works or opinions with which they disagree or find objectionable,” he added.

Drew Barrymore fired as host of National Book Awards after bringing back talk show amid SAG strikes

The National Book Awards have long been held in mid-November, shortly after the election, and are an early snapshot of the book world’s reaction: hopeful after Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, when publisher and honoree Barney Rosette Expected “a new and progressive agenda”; Grim but determined in 2016, after Donald Trump’s first victory, fiction winner Colson Whitehead urged audiences to “be kind to everyone, make art, and fight power.”

This year, as hundreds of people gathered for a dinner at Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan to mark the 75th anniversary of the awards, the mood was one of calm, determination and cheerfulness.

Host Kate McKinnon joked that she was recruited because the National Book Foundation wanted “some fun and light and a distraction from the fact that the world is a bonfire.” Musical guest Jon Batiste led the audience in a round of “When the Saints Go Marching In” and sang a few lines from “Hallelujah,” the Leonard Cohen standard that McKinnon previously performed on “Saturday Night Live.” . 2016 election.

Kingsolver acknowledged the feeling of “devastation at the moment” but added that she has known frustration before. He likened truth and love to forces of nature, like gravity and the sun, whether you see them or not. He said the writer’s job is to “imagine a better ending than the one we’ve been given.”

At a reading of the awards finalists Tuesday night, some spoke of community and support. Everett began her turn by assuring that she really “needed that kind of inspiration after the last two weeks. We need each other right now.” After warning that “hope is not a strategy,” he paused and said, “Never has a situation felt so absurd, so surreal, so ridiculous.”

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It took him a moment to realize that he wasn’t discussing current events, but reading from “James.”