TWO AUTHORS WIN THE 2022 NOVEL PRIZE:
ANNE DE MARCKEN AND JONATHAN BUCKLEY
New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and Giramondo are pleased to announce that Anne de Marcken and Jonathan Buckley have won the 2022 Novel Prize for their novels
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over and Tell.
The Novel Prize is a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world. It offers $10,000 to the winner and simultaneous publication in North America by New Directions, in the UK and Ireland by the London-based Fitzcarraldo Editions, and in Australia and New Zealand by the Sydney-based publisher Giramondo. Selected from the submissions of close to 1,000 writers, Anne de Marcken and Jonathan Buckley will share the award, and both of their novels will be published simultaneously by all three publishers in early 2024.
The prize rewards novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form, and are innovative and imaginative in style. Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, the inaugural winner in 2020, was selected from close to 1,500 submissions worldwide, and was published in March 2022.
Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a spare, haunting novel that asks how much of your memory, of your body, of the world as you know it—how much of what you love can you lose before you are lost? And then what happens? The protagonist is adrift in a familiar future: she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity. But she remembers the place where she knew herself and was known, and she is determined to get back there at any cost. She travels across the landscapes of time, encountering and losing parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. One of the most original books we’ve encountered, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Anne de Marcken is a queer interdisciplinary artist and writer living on unceded land of the Coast Salish people in Olympia, WA, in the United States.
Jonathan Buckley’s Tell is a probing, exuberant and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our lives and of other people’s. Structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has disappeared, and may or may not have committed suicide, it is a thrilling novel of strange, intoxicating immediacy. Jonathan Buckley is a writer, editor and teacher from the West Midlands, now living in Brighton. Since 2003 he has been a Fellow and an Advisory Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. In 2015 he won the BBC National Short Story Award for “Briar Road.” He regularly contributes to publications including the Times Literary Supplement. Tell is his twelfth novel.
Anne de Marcken, on being told of winning the prize, replied: “I write with an awareness—a belief—that the work is finished—again and again—by readers. To have It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over published makes this mysterious, dynamic collaboration possible. To have it published by New Directions, Fitzcarraldo, and Giramondo means that this part of the creative process will happen with so much integrity and imaginative force. I am humbled and so grateful.”
Jonathan Buckley said: “I’m delighted to be sharing this year’s Novel Prize—it’s a great honour to be joining the lists of Fitzcarraldo, New Directions and Giramondo, three of the boldest and most exciting publishers of contemporary writing.”
New Directions is particularly pleased to see two such brilliant and inventive novels—each remarkably singular—share the 2022 Novel Prize. We have loved publishing the first winner, Jessica Au, from Australia, and to now round out the Prize in its second iteration with winners from the USA and from the UK is an additional pleasure. (Au’s Cold Enough for Snow has since been sold into over twenty territories, and was the recipient of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in 2023.)
The Novel Prize is managed by the three publishers working in collaboration. Submissions were open from April 1 to June 1, 2022, with New Directions reading submissions from the Americas, Fitzcarraldo Editions from Africa and Europe, Giramondo from Asia and Australasia. The other shortlisted titles for the 2022 Novel Prize include Darcie Dennigan’s Forever Valley, Marie Doezema’s Aurora Australis, Florina Enache’s Palimpsest, Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat, Valer Popa’s Moon Over Bucharest, and Sola Saar’s Anonymity Is Life.
