By Hillel Italie
Percival Everett’s “James,” a daring reworking of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” has won the National Book Award for fiction. Jason De León’s “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling” won for nonfiction, where finalists included Salman Rushdie’s memoir about his brutal stabbing in 2022, “Knife.”
The prize for young people’s literature was given Wednesday night to Shifa Saltagi Safadi’s coming of age story “Kareem Between,” and the poetry award went to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s “Something About Living.” In the translation category, the winner was Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s “Taiwan Travelogue,” translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King.
Judging panels, made up of writers, critics, booksellers and others in the literary community, made their selections from hundreds of submissions, with publishers nominating more than 1,900 books in all. Each of the winners in the five competitive categories received $10,000.
Everett’s win continues his remarkable
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