Anne de Marcken has won the 2025 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, which honors an outstanding debut novel published during the preceding calendar year. Her winning book, “It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over,” published by New Directions, is an enigmatic exploration of grief and humanity in which an unnamed protagonist traverses through a landscape of zombies, death and destruction in search of the intangible. 

De Marcken will receive the award during a public event at VCU on Nov. 5. The event will involve a reading, a moderated discussion and a Q&A. Details of the event and additional materials will be made available at firstnovelist.vcu.edu/event/.

De Marcken was one of three finalists for the prize, now in its 24th year. The other finalists were Morgan Talty for “Fire Exit” (Tin House) and Jiaming Tang for “Cinema Love” (Dutton).

According to the publisher’s official synopsis of “It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over”:

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.”

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.

The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award celebrates the VCU MFA in Creative Writing program’s year-long novel workshop, the first in the nation and one of the few still in existence. The winning author receives a $5,000 prize and participates in an event, traditionally in person, with two additional panelists, most often the agent and editor of the winning book. The event, open to all, focuses on the creation, publication and promotion of the author's first novel.

The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award is presented on behalf of VCU’s MFA 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.

Over 200 novels were submitted for this year’s prize. A universitywide panel of readers in addition to members of the Richmond community reduced the submissions to a Top 20 Long List. From there, the Long List was considered by the MFA in Creative Writing students, who further narrowed the submissions from a Top 10 Short List to three finalists. The final round of judging included the MFA students and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Committee, with the previous year’s winner, Alice Winn, acting as a tie-breaking vote if needed.

In addition to de Marcken, previous winners of the award have included: Alice Winn for “In Memoriam,” Tess Gunty for “The Rabbit Hutch,” Dawnie Walton for “The Final Revival of Opal & Nev,” Raven Leilani for “Luster,” John Englehardt for “Bloomland,” Ling Ma for “Severance,” Hernán Diaz for “In the Distance” and Jade Chang for “The Wangs vs. the World.” A full list of winners can be found at firstnovelist.vcu.edu/winners/.

The 2026 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award is soon to announce a call for submissions for debut novels published in 2025, with a final submission deadline of Dec. 30, 2025. For more information, visit firstnovelist.vcu.edu/.