Anne de Marcken is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. Winner of the The Novel Prize, the Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize, and the Cabell Award, her novel, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, was simultaneously published by New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Giramondo (AU) in March of 2024, and been translated into five languages. She is also author of the lyric novella, The Accident: An Account (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), and her writing has been featured in Best New American Voices, Brick, Ploughshares, Narrative, Entropy, Litt, The Los Angeles Review, on NPR’s Selected Shorts and elsewhere. She is an Artist Trust Fellow (2017) and recipient of the Howard Frank Mosher Prize for Short Fiction, the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Prize, the Mary C. Mohr Short Fiction Award and the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Award, in addition to numerous jury and audience prizes for her feature film Group (2002). Site-specific works include Invisible Ink: Reparations (2017), Invisible Ink: Homeless (2018) and The Redaction Project (2016). Her work across disciplines has garnered grant and fellowship support from the Millay Colony, Jentel Foundation, Centrum, Artist Trust and the Hafer Family Foundation. Anne lives with her spouse, fellow artist M Freeman, on the unceded land of the Coast Salish people in Olympia, WA, where she runs the innovative small press The 3rd Thing.
Artist Statement
I’m from opposite places. From an island in the North Atlantic and a lake high in the Sierras. From wooden boats and quarter horses. I have an MFA, but no high school diploma. I’ve raised blackbirds, loons, swallows and no children. I’m skeptical and wholehearted. I’m queer. I’m still the girl in the photograph someone snapped—streaking along the edge of an ocean, stripped down to my underpants, hair wild as a warthog’s mane. Now I live at the southernmost tip of the Salish Sea. I have two desks in the room where I work. One for my writing. One for my work as an editor and publisher. I move the same chair back and forth. I am the same artist no matter where I’m sitting. It is all part of the same creative endeavor—a way of being in the world, of listening closely, of making connections and meaning.