NEW YORK (AP) 鈥� Percival Everett's novel 鈥淛ames,鈥� his acclaimed reworking of 鈥淭he Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,鈥� has won a $50,000 prize that continues Everett's recent wave of literary honors.
On Wednesday night, 鈥淛ames鈥� 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 鈥淒r. No鈥� and received such lifetime achievement honors as the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His 2001 novel 鈥淓rasure" was adapted last year into the Oscar-nominated film 鈥淎merican Fiction.鈥�
Adam Higginbotham鈥檚 鈥淐hallenger,鈥� about the 1986 space shuttle tragedy, won the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction; and Kenneth M. Cadow's 鈥滸ather," 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.
鈥淭his year鈥檚 prize-winning books 鈥� each written with elegance and lucidity 鈥� 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.
Hillel Italie, The Associated Press
