Winners

2025 Winner

Twenty Fourth Annual Award
It Lasts Forever And Then It's Over (New Directions) 
By Anne de Marcken

ABOUT IT LASTS FOREVER AND THEN ITS OVER FROM THE PUBLISHERS WEBSITE

This third person perspective on myself is disconcerting.

The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known — where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.

A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader’s mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over”plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader’s imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is the co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize. It also won the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award.

Publisher’s Weekly writes that in It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, “De Marcken never loses sight of the grand themes of life, death, and decay, as the narrator riffs cleverly on the nature of her condition (‘Zombies used to be drug addicts, television watchers, videogame players. Now zombies are zombies. Consumers are consumers’). It amounts to a sharp and weighty depiction of what does and doesn’t make someone human.”

Judges: The 2024 Winner Alice Winn; Students from the VCU MFA in Creative Writing Program; and the Cabell First Novelist Award Committee

Finalists:  Morgan Talty for Fire Exit (Tin House) and Jiaming Tang for Cinema Love”(Dutton).