The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation has announced the winner of its 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, which gives a $25,000 cash prize to the author of a book-length work of fiction that shows the writer is a realist “of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.”
This year, the selection panel— Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado—selected Anne De Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over as the winner.
“It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a work of quietly detonative imagination,” the panel said in a statement. “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.”
In her own statement, de Marcken shared that Le Guin’s Earthsea books were where she first “recognized my own experience of life, complicated and shadowy and potent-feeling, filled with imminent magic.”
She added, “I took it with me into life, and I feel it still today. And it’s how I write, toward a feeling. I think Ursula K. Le Guin taught me this. So my first thanks goes to her. Thank you to Ursula K. Le Guin for helping me to become the writer that I wanted to be, and thank you for this prize.”
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over came out on March 5, 2024 via New Directions Publishing. Congratulations to de Marcken and the previously announced short list recipients for this year’s award.
