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The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction recognizes authors who are “realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now”—the kind of stories Ursula K. Le Guin referenced in her 2014 National Book Awards speech. This year, the $25,000 prize was awarded by a panel of judges made up of Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado.
The winner of the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction is Anne de Marcken for her novella It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. Here’s how the panel describes it:
“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.”
You can watch de Marcken’s acceptance speech on YouTube, where she recounts reading Le Guin’s Earthsea books and having “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. 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.”
