Anne de Marcken wins Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

Anne de Marcken is the winner of the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction for It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. The work is the American author’s debut novel and second book.

Now in its third year, the prize is ‘an annual $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction’ and is ‘intended to recognize those writers Ursula spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech – realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.’

The judges this year were Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado. 

‘It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a work of quietly detonative imagination,’ wrote the panel. ‘Written in the guise of a zombie novel, it quickly reveals itself to be a deeply felt meditation on the many afterlives of memory, the strange disorienting space where our pasts go to disintegrate. As the heroine wanders a shattered world, clutching a dead crow that is still muttering away, she becomes an incarnation of grief – its numbness and regrets and heartbreaks – and of the inevitability of our decline: we are what we lose. Haunting, poignant, and surprisingly funny, Anne de Marcken’s book is a tightly written tour de force about what it is to be human.’

de Marcken’s novel was the joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, and was published early this year by Giramondo (AU/NZ), New Directions (US) and Fitzcarraldo (UK). 

Watch de Marcken’s acceptance speech – in which she recalls her early impulse towards writing, and her first encounter with Le Guin’s work – below: