America’s National Book Award held its 75th annual awards ceremony earlier this week. A panel of esteemed judges award ‘the best writing in the US’. Percival Everett claimed the top prize in the fiction category for his novel James, a retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the point of view of ‘Jim’ – the runaway slave.
James was the favourite to win the Booker Prize this year but lost to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. In his acceptance speech, Everett essentially let his satirical work speak for itself, thanking his friends and family.
“Two weeks ago, I was feeling pretty low and, to tell you the truth, I still feel pretty low,” Everett said in relation to the recent US election. “As I look out at this, so much excitement about books, I have to say, I do feel some hope.”
Other big winners included Jason De Leon for non-fiction. His work, entitled Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, is a character-driven examination of human smuggling, as immigration continues to be a divisive topic in the US.
Read: Another glittering award for Melissa Lucashenko, as she takes out the ARA Historical Prize
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha won the poetry category for her collection Something About Living. Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King won in the translated literature category for their work Taiwan Travelogue and Shifa Saltagi Safadi won in the young people’s literature category for her work Kareem Between.
Past notable winners of the award include Jonathan Franzen (2001), John Updike (1964), Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015), Saul Bellow (1954, 1965 and 1971), William Faulkner (1951 and 1955) and Colson Whitehead (2016), while notable stars of the literary world who were famously nominated but never took home the Prize include James Baldwin (four nominations in 1957, 1962, 1964 and 1980) and Toni Morrison (1975 and 1987). Read more about the US National Book Awards.
