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Percival Everett has won the $10,000 National Book Award for fiction, one of the US’s most prestigious literary prizes, for James, his acclaimed reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Guardian reports.

The 67-year-old author was also shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize for James, which focuses on Huckleberry Finn’s enslaved character Jim. The Guardian’s Anthony Cummins called the book “gripping, painful, funny, horrifying” in his review.

Everett, whose previous novel Erasure was adapted into the Oscar-winning 2023 comedy American Fiction, saw off competition from 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 his category.

“Two weeks ago, I was feeling pretty low,” Everett told the audience at the NBA ceremony in New York on Wednesday night, alluding to the US election result. “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.”

In other categories, MacArthur fellow Jason De León won the $10,000 nonfiction category for his book Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling. De León was up against Salman Rushdie, who was nominated for his first National Book Award for his bestselling memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.

A year after sponsors withdrew from the NBAs when the finalists banded together to issue a statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, many of this year’s winners used their speeches to call for peace in the Middle East.

Palestinian American poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, who won the $10,000 poetry category for her collection Something About Living, said, “We are now living in the second November of the American-funded genocide in Palestine. I hope that every one of us can love ourselves enough to stand up and to make it stop.”