We are thrilled to discover that Anne de Marcken has won the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction for It Lasts Forever and Then It‘s Over.
The panel, consisting of Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado said of the book:
‘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.’
A tale for our dispossessed times, and one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, It Lasts Forever and Then It‘s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. The novel was the co-winner of our 2022 Novel Prize, published in collaboration with New Directions in North America and Giramondo in Australia and New Zealand.
