The Novelist and Poet Laura Vazquez Has Won the December 2025 Prize for Les Forces, a grand queer tragicomic novel as raw as it is comforting, between a coming-of-age narrative and a philosophical wandering.
There is something almost intimidating about opening Les Forces, the new novel by the poetess and novelist Laura Vazquez, at the end of 2025. Released in August, the book published by Éditions du Sous-Sol has met with widespread critical acclaim, winning the Décembre Prize, the Blu Jean-Marc Roberts prize, and Les Inrockuptibles. We thus begin the reading with a mouth-watering anticipation.
“The hours were long in my childhood, and I did not kill myself.” From the outset, the tone is set for a narrative where humor sits beside the deepest disarray, and whose ultralucidity of the narrator oscillates between ironic distance and existential vertigo. After leaving the parental home, the protagonist meets, in a lesbian bar, an old sapphic Sibyl who invites her on an odd journey: a voyage to encounter people who touch death…
Queer Forces
For the young woman, who struggles to find her place in the world and to give it meaning, the following pages read as a coming-of-age novel. But Les Forces is above all a philosophical ramble, dense and playful, nourished by references. Laura Vazquez thus calls upon Wittgenstein—probably one of the funniest and most tragic philosophers—but also Kant, Rousseau, Simone Weil, Plato, Beckett or Kierkegaard to interrogate, among other things, the way language shapes reality. By doing so, the author forges her own language: Les Forces is as much a novel as a prose poem.
In the writer, an adopted Marseillaise, the verb resonates, enchants, sometimes imprisons as much as it carries away. One often finds oneself reading this text aloud, which calls for orality; the experience is jubilant from a writing that listens as much as it reads, savors as much as it deciphers. Although Laura Vazquez does not claim any influence—and if any, Kafka only—one thinks of Virginie Despentes for the breathless cadence and the exploration of margins, but also Maggie Nelson for the demanding prose, the poetics of everyday life, and the blending of genres.
These echoes are not merely incidental. “Lesbian literature” is not a simple label slapped onto Vazquez’s work: one finds in her a fierce determination not to enter a mold, not to seek to please at any cost, while cultivating a certain gentleness and a form of benevolence toward the world. Les Forces is also, more broadly, a reflection of a queer experience: the author brilliantly transcribes this feeling of estrangement, this sense of belonging to the world without fully managing to integrate into the human community. Her novel is one of those books that you read in one go, without catching your breath, and that you reopen regularly afterward, for the pleasure of savoring a passage, a sentence, an idea—like returning to a familiar place whose corners you have not finished exploring.
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