Author Percival Everett Wins National Book Award For Reimagining ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Through Enslaved Character Jim’s Lens

Everett centers 'James' on the enslaved character Jim from Mark Twain's 1884 picaresque novel.

Percival Everett’s acclaimed reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn won the $10,000 National Book Award for fiction.

Everett, a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California, centers his retelling, James, on the enslaved character Jim from Twain’s 1884 picaresque novel. Praised by critics as “gripping, painful, funny, horrifying,” Everett’s reimagining earned him one of the most prestigious literary awards in the United States, The Guardian reports.

In addition to winning the National Book Award, Everett, 67, is also a finalist for this year’s Booker Prize, a highly esteemed literary honor awarded annually for the best work of sustained fiction written in English. Literary success continues to follow Everett, a prolific author of dozens of books, whose previous novel, Erasure, was adapted into the 2023 Oscar-winning comedy American Fiction.

Everett’s novel James beat 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 the fiction category. While accepting his award at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony in New York on Wednesday night, Everett remarked that the honor has helped lift him out of the funk he’s been in since the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

“Two weeks ago, I was feeling pretty low,” he said. “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,” he said.

He opened his speech by taking a jab at artificial intelligence, saying it’s “no replacement for the real thing.”

Others awarded during the ceremony include Jason De León, whose book Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling serves as an anthropological look at the people who bring migrants over the southern border. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha won the poetry award for her collection Something About Living, an expansive look at Palestinian history and diaspora. Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and her translator, Lin King, won the prize for translated literature for their book Taiwan Travelogue, a novel about the relationship between a Japanese novelist and her Taiwanese interpreter.