At a ceremony last night, Aspen Words announced the winner of their annual Aspen Words Literary Prize, which awards $35,000 to “a work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture.” This year’s winner is Maria Reva, for her debut novel Endling .  The AWLP jury described the book as “an audacious novel about people fighting many different kinds of extinction. Part metafiction, part war chronicle, part absurdist picaresque, Maria Reva’s book begins with an ecological adventure in pre-war Ukraine involving, of all things, a critically endangered snail species. But the tale soon takes on metafictional twists and turns as real-life Russian tanks and soldiers invade the country.…