Percival Everett’s novel James won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2025 on Sunday, January 26, 2025.
The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction were established to recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the United States in the previous year in 2012. Worth $5,000 to the winners, they are named in honour of nineteenth-century American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in recognition of his deep belief in the power of books and learning to change the world. Some of the previous winners of the award supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and administered by the American Library Association have been Hanif Abdurraqib, Kiese Laymon, James McBride, and Colson Whitehead.
The 2025 winners were announced at the American Library Association LibLearnX conference, held January 24-27 in Phoenix, Arizona. In the fiction category, the winning title was James written by Percival Everett and published by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House. In an astounding riposte, Everett rewrites Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a liberation narrative, told from James’s point of view. When he is accused of robbery and murder, James flees with an initially gleeful Huck, who only gradually understands the terrifying reality of being a Black man with a price on his head. Determined to return and rescue his wife and daughter, James takes the story in a completely different direction than the original, exemplifying the relentless courage and moral clarity of an honorable man with nothing to lose.
Calling James “an astounding riposte” to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the American Library Association said that Everett “takes the story in a completely different direction than the original, exemplifying the relentless courage and moral clarity of an honorable man with nothing to lose.”
All the finalists will be honored and the winners will be presented with their medals during a celebratory event at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts during ALA’s 2025 Annual Conference in Philadelphia in June.
Please support our work at Writing Africa with a one-off donation or regularly on PayPal, Ko-Fi, Patreon, or Mobile Money by clicking here.
Leave a Reply