Anne de Marcken is the winner of the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, the $25,000 award given annually “to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction.”
De Marcken took home the prize for It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, published in March by New Directions. The novella, which was also the co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, tells the story of a woman adrift in the afterlife, accompanied by a crow that lives in her chest.
Judging this year’s award were authors 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,” the judges said in a citation. “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 a speech accepting the award, de Marcken recalled reading Le Guin’s Earthsea books. “It was the first time, I think, that I read a book in which I recognized my own experience of life, complicated and shadowy and potent-feeling, filled with imminent magic….I remember that feeling of recognition, that feeling of vast, intimate possibility perfectly clearly. I took it with me into life, and I feel it still today.”
The Le Guin Prize was established in 2022 in honor of the legendary science fiction and fantasy author who died in 2018. Its previous winners ae Khadija Abdalla Bajaber for The House of Rust and Rebecca Campbell for Arboreality.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
