The Library of Congress has awarded the 2024 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction to James McBride. One of the Library’s most prestigious awards, the annual prize honors an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but also for its originality of thought and imagination. The award commends strong, unique, enduring voices that tell us something essential about the American experience.
“I’m honored to bestow the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction on a writer as imaginative and knowing as James McBride,” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said in a July 11 statement. “McBride knows the American soul deeply, reflecting our struggles and triumphs in his fiction, which so many readers have intimately connected with. I, also, am one of his enthusiastic readers.”
McBride is the author of “Deacon King Kong;” “The Good Lord Bird,” which won the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction;" “The Color of Water;” “Song Yet Sung;” the story collection, “Five-Carat Soul;” and the James Brown biography, “Kill ’Em and Leave.” In 2016, McBride was awarded the National Humanities Medal. He is also a musician, a composer, and a current distinguished writer-in-residence at New York University.
McBride will receive the prize at the 2024 Library of Congress National Book Festival on August 24 in Washington, D.C., where he will also discuss his most recent novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” which received the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and was named Barnes & Noble’s 2023 Book of the Year.
“I wish my mom were still alive to know about this,” he said. “I’m delighted and honored. Does it mean I can use the Library? If so, I’m double thrilled.”
For more information on the prize, including previous winners, visit https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/prizes/fiction-prize.
Photo: James McBride, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
