How to escape a single quote inside awk

A single quote is represented using \x27

Like in

awk 'BEGIN {FS=" ";} {printf "\x27%s\x27 ", $1}'

Source

This maybe what you're looking for:

awk 'BEGIN {FS=" ";} {printf "'\''%s'\'' ", $1}'

That is, with '\'' you close the opening ', then print a literal ' by escaping it and finally open the ' again.