Laura Vazquez, a poet and novelist who came into broader public view at forty with Les Forces, has seen her book receive critical attention and the Prix Décembre in 2026. The image of a writer quietly working in Marseille who rarely uses social media contrasts with the newfound visibility of her work. In conversations at bookshops and in the messages readers send her, Vazquez has discovered that a text does not only travel through time as a contribution to a long tradition: it also acts here and now. That discovery reshaped how she thinks about the responsibility of a creator toward readers and language.
Les Forces has been described as a hybrid text: part coming-of-age narrative, part walking meditation, and part prose poem. Vazquez treats novel and poetry as parallel spaces where language must be reinvented. Her practice balances an initial exploratory phase — an improvisatory search for voice — with a later, meticulous reworking of rhythm and structure. The following sections examine how public reception, creative method, and influences converge in her work, and how questions about the sacred, genre and minority perspectives animate her writing.
The effect of reception: from timeless conversation to immediate consequence
Living away from online platforms, Vazquez learned about the book’s impact through in-person encounters and written notes from readers. That personal contact altered her sense of the reception of literature: she now sees books as interventions in present experience, not only as contributions to a longue durée. This shift brought into focus a new ethical dimension. She worries about the ways texts can shape feelings and actions, invoking historical examples such as Goethe’s Werther phenomenon to illustrate how literature can have unintended consequences. Vazquez said she does not want her work to normalize suffering or glamorize pain; instead, she aims for a language that preserves intensity without steering readers toward harm.
Two phases of creation: exploration and technical craft
Vazquez describes composition as a two-part journey. The first stage is instinctive and resembles an expedition into unknown terrain: voices emerge, impressions accumulate, and the writer follows an internal listening. She compares this phase to discovering a new planet where habits of movement and respiration must be invented. Once that raw material exists, the second phase begins — a labor of revision that focuses on syntax, cadence, and the book’s overall weave. For her, the initial truthfulness of the material determines whether the precise sculpting that follows will be faithful. This balance keeps both the spontaneity of poetry and the architectural needs of a longer work.
Influences, porous genres and philosophical neighbors
Vazquez names a wide constellation of influences that feed her practice: from Kafka’s tonal precision to the courtly lists of Sei Shonagon, from the painterly restraint of Agnès Martin to the raw narratives of Hubert Selby Jr. and the formal daring of William Faulkner. She also summons philosophers as literary kin — notably Spinoza and Wittgenstein — arguing that certain philosophical texts function like poems because of their formal depth. Rather than carving strict boundaries, she prefers a porosity between genres; novels can introduce readers to the language of poetry, and poetic works can act as philosophical provocations.
On identity, minority perspectives and language
Asked about the idea of a specifically lesbian literature, Vazquez echoes Monique Wittig’s skepticism toward fixed literary categories. She supports writers who identify as lesbian and encourages initiatives such as prizes that amplify marginalized voices, yet resists the notion that a distinct ‘lesbian style’ or an essential ‘female writing’ exists. For her, the important thing is how voices alter the ideological assumptions embedded in language — how they fissure categories rather than establish new boxes. The political work is done from within the language itself, by shifting perspectives and making the habitual feel unsettled.
Sacred, healing and a path toward quiet practice
Vazquez draws a line between institutional religion and a persistent hunger for the sacred or invisible aspects of experience. Poetry functions as a form of self-care and repair: it links the writer to depths that ordinary social aims cannot satisfy. She has increasingly turned to zen practice as a complementary discipline — not as doctrine but as a way to sustain an attention necessary for creative life. That sensibility also informs her ethical stance: writing must care for the reader rather than exploit affective vulnerabilities.
Vazquez is currently drafting a new book of poems and plans to present excerpts in public readings: at the Odéon‑théâtre de l’Europe in Paris at the end of March, and later in May at the Oh les beaux jours! festival in Marseille. The interview appears in the spring issue of the magazine têtu, and the portrait that accompanies the piece is credited to Daniele Molajoli. In a literary landscape that often emphasizes branding and immediacy, Vazquez’s practice insists on quiet attention, craft and an ethical consideration of how language shapes life.