De Marcken Wins Le Guin Prize

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken (New Directions) is the winner of the third Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, which includes a $25,000 cash prize, given “to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction” and presented by the Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust.

The judges called the book

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.

Other finalists were:

• The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)
• The Skin and Its Girl, Sarah Cypher (Ballantine)
• Orbital, Samantha Harvey (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• Sift, Alissa Hattman (The 3rd Thing)
• The Library of Broken Worlds, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Scholastic)
• Those Beyond the Wall, Micaiah Johnson (Del Rey)
• The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed (Solaris)
• Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh (Tordotcom)
• Mammoths at the Gates, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)

The award “is intended to recognize those writers Le Guin 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 2024 selection panel includes Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado. The winner was announced October 21, 2024, on Le Guin’s birthday.

For more information, see the Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust website.

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