America’s National Book Award held its 75th annual awards ceremony earlier this week. A panel of esteemed judges award ‘the best writing in the US’. Percival Everett claimed the top prize in the fiction category for his novel James, a retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the point of view of ‘Jim’ – the runaway slave.
Other big winners included Jason De Leon for non-fiction. His work, entitled Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, is a character-driven examination of human smuggling, as immigration continues to be a divisive topic in the US.
