October 21, 2024, 1:56pm
Anne de Marcken has won the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction for her novel It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (New Directions). Marcken’s novel was selected from a shortlist of ten by an illustrious panel—Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado—who had this to say about their choice:
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a work of quietly detonative imagination. 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.”
Read an excerpt from It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over here.
You can watch the announcement, and de Marcken’s speech, below: