Les Forces
Poetry Talk with Laura Vazquez

Reading
Talk
Poesiefestival Berlin 2026
Atelierraum, silent green
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© Elise Blotière

“‘In my childhood, the hours were long; still, I didn’t kill myself.’” – this is how Les Forces, the second novel by poet Laura Vazquez (born 1986 in Perpignan, France), begins. The book was awarded the Prix Décembre and the Prix Les Inrockuptibles and will appear in German translation by Sonja Finck under the title Die Kräfte in late summer with park x ullstein.

The protagonist of Les Forces is in search of a life that is true – beyond social order and capitalist logics of exploitation – and of a language that moves past worn-out phrases and clichés: “The world is unwell. The world lies. And when I say ‘world,’ I mean people.”

In doing so, she passes through five stages: childhood, in which she already senses an alienation from her surroundings, which are content with prefabricated thoughts, ways of speaking, and models of living; a lesbian bar, where she meets Claudie, a beer-drinking “ancient lesbian from another time,” who encourages her to write poetry; the house of the dead, to which Claudie sends her for further mental maturation; the building of sects, where she experiments with grotesque sects such as the sect of sleep or that of absolute uncertainty; and finally, after putting up her own missing-person poster and leaving the city, the nature of the mountains.

The genre label “novel” seems almost a little misleading for this highly condensed, ironic genre mash-up, which in its poetic reflection and astonishing wealth of imagery reveals Vazquez as a poet in the best sense. At the same time, the text clearly draws on the tradition of the Bildungsroman, interspersed with a wide range of literary-theoretical and intellectual-historical references (Kierkegaard, Weil, Woolf, Bernhard, to name but a few), and translates it into the present of screens, the attention economy, and self-alienation, in which “we are only rarely aware of our own existence.”

Laura Vazquez in conversation with Sonja Finck

The event will be interpreted into French and German.
Kindly supported by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen.

Funded by: Institut français Berlin