[Interview to be found in têtu’s Spring magazine, in kiosks or by subscription.] The poetess and novelist Laura Vazquez met her audience at 40 with The Forces, awarded in 2025 the Décembre Prize. A complex book, part coming-of-age narrative, philosophical wandering, and prose poem, at once raw and comforting.
Depuis sa parution, l’été dernier, Les Forces a connu un beau succès à la fois critique et auprès du public. Comment vis-tu cette lumière nouvelle ?
I don’t live it; I don’t go on social networks. My life is quiet and repetitive, centered on writing, in Marseille. I realize the effects of the reception of this book during bookstore events, or through the messages some people write me about this text or the previous ones. These exchanges have slightly shifted my way of feeling literature. Before, I mainly viewed it in a very broad perspective, on the scale of long time. I felt I was writing less for the present than in a continuity, following authors of antiquity, the Middle Ages, of all times. Discussing with readers made me understand that literature has an impact on the present time, on beings, on perceptions, on the political relation to the world, to language. It engages a responsibility I did not measure, which I did not think about much.
A responsibility, in what sense?
I tell myself that I would not like to lead people toward pain, toward banality, normativity, or toward a romanticization of sorrow, for example. I often think of Goethe, whose book The Sorrows of Young Werther triggered a wave of suicides in Germany. It’s terrible. How did he experience it? He did not speak about it. Literature acts on the individuals it touches. Whatever the reception of a work, even when there is only one person who reads us.
N’est-il pas frustrant, pour une poétesse, de rencontrer davantage d’écho en publiant un roman ?
I write poetry and fiction with the same intensity, the same desire for truth. One does not write literature without inventing a language, in both cases. Novels can constitute an entry door for people who are not used to reading poetry. Narrative allows one to cross a threshold. Writers such as Eugène Savitzkaya, Anne Carson, Anne Serre, Olivier Cadiot, Jon Fosse, or Ken Bugul work a field that lies in the porosity of genres. This is what I try to do as well.
Comment travailles-tu cette écriture qui semble à la fois instinctive et ciselée ?
There is first a phase where I write a text that becomes a book. I am one voice, or several voices, and at that moment my task is to stay attentive, to follow intuitions, impressions. It is a work of listening and trust. Moreover, it does not resemble a work, but rather an expedition, an exploration, an adventure. It is as if I discover an unknown planet. I do not know how one walks on this planet, how one breathes there, how a body behaves there. Everything is created, everything grows, and I discover as I go. This first phase is instinctive, without reason. The second is that of re-reading and rewriting. I then revise the text precisely, working on the rhythm, grammatical and syntactic structures, echoes, the overall weaving of the book. When the first phase has occurred with a sense of truth, almost of goodness in the etymological sense, then the second follows naturally. I must trust something that surpasses me.
Tu cites volontiers tes influences, comme Kafka. Il y en a d’autrès qui comptent autant ?
Many! I am completely petrified, steeped in them. I am made only of that, if I may say so. I have been influenced from birth, perhaps even before, and these influences continue to act, they cross time, works, forms, languages, and deposit themselves in sometimes very subterranean ways. The artists whose work influenced me are numerous: I would gladly mention Sei Shonagon [Japanese court lady of the 10th century, woman of letters, author of Notes de chevet, ed.], the painter Agnès Martin, or Hubert Selby Jr. and William Faulkner. I owe them a lot. Thank you to them.
Dans Les Forces, tu cites beaucoup de philosophes. Poète et philosophe ?
I make little distinction between the different fields of inquiry and creation through language. Some philosophy books can be read as poetry books. I think, for example, of Baruch Spinoza’s work, cited in The Forces, or that of Ludwig Wittgenstein, also present in the book. These are works that are also poetic, formal, aesthetic, that touch beyond logic, in a deeper zone.
Il y a quelque chose de souvent mystique dans tes travaux. Quel rapport entretiens-tu avec la religion, l’invisible ?
With religion, I do not have much relation. On the other hand, with the sacred, the invisible, the whole, I have a permanent relationship, indispensable to my survival. Poetry is a form of medicine, at first. A link to evil, to the deep, to healing, to everything. Life as presented in today’s society, with its ambitions, its goals, its perspectives, does not suffice at all for the human mind. It makes people sick. It does not satisfy me; it could even kill me. For several years, I have been very interested in the practice of Zen.
La rentrée littéraire 2025 a été marquée par plusieurs romans écrits par des lesbiennes, ainsi que par la première édition du prix Gouincourt. Existe-t-il une littérature lesbienne ?
This is heartening and important; I support my lesbian friends and writers as much as I can. On the question in the broad sense, I share Monique Wittig’s thinking. I do not think there exists a literature specifically lesbian, no more than I believe in the existence of feminine writing. I believe that there are people who make gestures in language and thus touch the ideological construction embodied by this language. It is more about introducing minority viewpoints, not to create new identity categories, but to open, to move from within. What matters to me is not the affirmation of an identity, but the capacity of language to fissure categories, the smooth, the fixed.
Est-ce qu’on va relire Laura Vazquez en 2026 ?
I am currently writing a poetry book. Excerpts from this collection will be presented as reading-performances at the Odéon‑théâtre de l’Europe, in Paris, at the end of March, then in May, at the Oh les beaux jours festival, in Marseille.
