Laia Llobera: "Very unique things happened in Occitania"

BarcelonaThe poet Laia Llobera (Barcelona, ​​1983) has immersed herself in 12th-century Occitania in every sense in Saur (Proa), winner of the 2025 Miquel de Palol Poetry Prize. Llobera, who holds a doctorate in Catalan language and literature and degrees in translation and interpreting and in religious studies, not only rediscovers the voice of troubadours but also explores questions about the earth, in its most sensual and ancestral sense, death, origins, death, origins, preceded.

The genesis of the book began some time ago, when Llobera read The genius of oc by Simone Weil. It discusses Occitan civilization and compares it to Greek civilization. Weil argues that if the Cathars and Occitan civilization hadn't disappeared, Europe might have a more advanced civilization, because Occitania was a powerful center of cultural and spiritual life. "I knew about the Cathars, but I hadn't grasped them from this perspective. About five years ago, with the pandemic, I started studying theology, I got a degree in religious studies and then specialized in biblical theology. I immersed myself in heresies throughout history, and one of them... that in recent summers we've traveled many kilometers to discover all the landscapes of Occitania with the family," explains Llobera, who pays homage to the world of castles and Cathars, of faith and struggle, but also of peasants.

Religions have always fascinated Llobera. “I studied at a Jesuit school, and spirituality was a big focus. At 18, however, I rejected it all outright, and it was buried. With the pandemic, and after one of my children became ill, I decided to study theology,” he explains. “I needed to put words to and conceptualize a belief, to rationalize it, to study the word of God. And to look at it from the outside, because religious studies takes a scientific approach to the religious phenomenon.” Llobera, in some aspects, feels distant from the current Church. “I feel a bit like a Cathar. Religion is ultimately the vehicle, the structure, the hierarchy, the doctrine, the body of doctrine, of something very intimate. Throughout history, we have seen how religions have, in many cases, damaged their essence. After all, Jesus didn't found any religion.”

The Power of the Occitan Language

The poet admires the innovation that troubadour poetry represented. "Until then, written poetry was in the cultivated language, Latin, and the troubadours were the first to write in the vernacular, in Occitan. Very unique things happened in Occitania," she says. Saur There is a vindication of this poetic legacy and a warning about what could happen to the language. "Occitan is now spoken by only four elderly people and it's dying. It was a luminous and powerful language and it's disappearing, and the same could happen to Catalan," he states.

There is also a latent desire to remember what has come before us: "There are things that have come before us that aren't positive, but I wanted to remember what has made us a people, what has given us culture, and what has given us roots. In times when everything is very fast and very hard, I want to build things, I want to build a craft that lasts. We don't give enough value to older people, and that's also why I'm vindicating our ancestors," he asserts.

The book's title, Saur, It is documented in Occitan. It means golden brownIt's also the color of the poetry collection's cover. "It's a way of vindicating everything that doesn't have material value. The danger of today's spiritualities is that sometimes some get too caught up in the self, in inner work. Inner work is all well and good, but I think it needs to be translated outward, because otherwise we remain inside ourselves and then we keep feeding the ego," L'Euro concludes.