Percival Everett’s “James” won the National Book Award for fiction Wednesday at the National Book Foundation’s 75th ceremony and dinner in New York.

Honors for the novel, which centers on Jim, the enslaved man in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” were a fitting conclusion to a program that was unusually political, with two authors calling for freeing Palestine and others mentioning book banning. Although “James” was published by Doubleday/Penguin Random House, Everett thanked Minneapolis-based Graywolf Press for being another of his publishers for many years.

Graywolf was a winner too, taking honors in the translated literature category for “Taiwan Travelogue” by Yang Shuang-zi, translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. It’s about a fictional Japanese writer and her relationship with the charming yet closed-off Taiwanese woman who serves as her interpreter.

The nonfiction prize went to Jason De Leon for “Soldiers And Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” written after he embedded with a group of human smugglers to document the trauma, violence and poverty that fuels one intimate group and the larger mass movement north of undocumented immigrants.

The award for poetry went to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha for “Something About Living.”

Shifa Saltagi Safadi won the young people’s literature award for “Kareem Between,” a novel-in-verse chronicling the story of a Syrian American Muslim teen stuck in the middle of cultures, parents, and countries as he tries to forge his moral compass.

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