Percival Everett's 'James' wins $50,000 Kirkus Prize for fiction

[October 17, 2024]  By HILLEL ITALIE

NEW YORK (AP) — Percival Everett's novel “James,” his acclaimed reworking of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” has won a $50,000 prize that continues Everett's recent wave of literary honors. 

On Wednesday night, “James” was awarded the Kirkus Prize for fiction. Everett's novel, which imagines Mark Twain's classic from the perspective of the escaped enslaved man whom Huckleberry Finn befriends, is also a finalist for the National Book Award and the Booker Prize.

In the past three years, Everett has been a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize and for the National Book Critics Circle prize, won the PEN/Jean Stein award for the novel “Dr. No” and received such lifetime achievement honors as the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His 2001 novel “Erasure" was adapted last year into the Oscar-nominated film “American Fiction.”

Adam Higginbotham’s “Challenger,” about the 1986 space shuttle tragedy, won the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction; and Kenneth M. Cadow's ”Gather," a coming-of-age novel set in rural Vermont, was cited for young readers' literature. Like Everett, Higginbotham and Cadow each will receive $50,000.

“This year’s prize-winning books — each written with elegance and lucidity — illuminate tragedies both personal and historical, helping us to better understand our world and the spirit of human resilience," Tom Beer, editor-in-chief of Kirkus, said in a statement.

The awards are presented by the longtime publication Kirkus Reviews. Previous winners of the awards, established in 2014, include Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roz Chast and James McBride.

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