Event
Event
Anne de Marcken winner of the 2025 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award for It Lasts Forever And Then It's Over, gives a reading and participates in a moderated Q&A session about the writing and publishing of her book on Nov. 5, 2025 at 7 p.m.
Per the publishers official synopsis, 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.
The event is free and open to all and will be held in person but will also be live streamed through Zoom. The in-person location will be James Branch Cabell Library, Room 303, 901 Park Ave., Richmond, Va. 23219. Parking is available for a fee in the West Broad Street, West Main Street and West Cary Street parking decks.
Registration
Registration forthcoming
About the Author
Anne de Marcken is a queer interdisciplinary artist and writer living on unceded land of the Coast Salish people in Olympia, Washington. She is the founding editor and publisher of the 3rd Thing. She is the co winner of of the 2022 Novel Prize.
Sponsors
The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award is presented on behalf of VCU’s M.F.A. in Creative Writing program. Sponsors include: the James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Libraries, the Friends of VCU Libraries, the VCU Department of English and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences.
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).