Laure Gouraige is a French novelist based in Paris. She is the author of four novels: La Fille du père (P.O.L, 2020), Les Idées noires (P.O.L, 2022), Le livre que je n’ai pas écrit (P.O.L, 2024), and Grave (Les Intranquilles, 2026). Her work explores questions of identity, memory, family, and the ways fiction transforms lived experience. She is currently completing Mirapolis, a novel inspired by her writing residency in the United States. In 2026, she was awarded the Jules Verne Writing Residency, which has brought her to several universities across the American Midwest.
Learning to Live Inside a Novel: This talk explores the evolution of my writing process, from my first autobiographical texts to my current work of fiction, Mirapolis. Rather than focusing on my published books themselves, I would like to reflect on what each of them has taught me about becoming a novelist. I will discuss the relationship between lived experience and fiction, the challenge of transforming personal experience into literature, the role of philosophical questioning in my work, and the gradual shift from writing about myself to inventing entirely fictional worlds. Finally, I will reflect on how working on a long-term project has transformed my understanding of writing, not as a succession of moments of inspiration or urgency, but as a way of inhabiting time.
This event is sponsored by the Department of French and Italian’s French Center of Excellence, which receives funding from French Cultural Services in the US and the Consulate General of France in Chicago. This series is also supported by the following Departments and Centers at Ohio State: Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Literatures, Near Eastern and South Asian Languages, Germanic Languages and Literatures, History, Design, and the Humanities Institute.
