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 spare and haunting. It's heroine is 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. 

Anne de Marcken is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is author of the novel “It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over” and the lyric novella “The Accident: An Account”. She is editor and publisher of The 3rd Thing press.

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.

De Marcken will receive the award during a public event at VCU on November 5, 2025. 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 www.firstnovelist.vcu.edu/event