It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken (New Directions) has won the $25,000 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, sponsored by the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation and given to a writer for a single book-length work of imaginative fiction. The prize is intended to recognize 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 judges called It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over "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."
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Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib (Catapult) has won the $5,000 2024 Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Award, which recognizes recently published works that illuminate the complexity of the human experience as told by immigrants, whose work is historically underrepresented in writing and publishing. (See our review here.)
Finalists Carrie Sun, author of Private Equity: A Memoir (Penguin Press), and Alex Espinoza, author of The Sons of El Rey (Simon & Schuster), were each awarded $1,000.
The judges said, "With disarming humor, Shanaz Habib in Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel challenges the presupposition that people from the Global South 'don't travel, they immigrate.' Through essays, both personal and well-researched, she tackles a wide range of travel-related topics from the history of passports to forests, carousels, and pickles. The realities she uncovers in the process are often as startling as they are eye-opening and reshape our sense of what it means to travel as a person from the Third World across disparate geographies, from the streets of Brooklyn to those of Istanbul. A captivating, beautifully written work that will spark many conversations."
The award is sponsored by Fall for the Book at George Mason University and the Institute for Immigration Research.