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

By Hillel Italie, The Associated Press on October 16, 2024.

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.