Juliette Ponce Leads Robert Laffont Foreign List
Publisher Juliette Ponce now directs Robert Laffont's foreign domain while continuing to run her own imprint, Dalva.
Juliette Ponce has been appointed director of the foreign domain at major French publisher Robert Laffont. She will continue to run her own publishing house, Dalva, which she founded in 2021. This dual role highlights the possible coexistence of different editorial approaches within a large publishing group.
Ponce states her intention is to "publish less, but better" to consolidate support for her titles. She sees her position as bridging two worlds: the scouting of emerging voices on one hand, and the planning of print runs for authors with worldwide sales, like Ken Follett, on the other.
Dalva's Foundation and Focus
Dalva was created in May 2021 within the Bourgois group before being integrated into the Robert Laffont ecosystem in 2024. From its launch, the imprint committed to publishing women. This decision was a direct response to statistics from a 2018 report by France's National Book Centre (CNL), which Ponce consulted before starting. That report attributed 65% of general literature publications to men.
Five years after Dalva's creation, Ponce observes a growing space for women in publishers' catalogs. She also notes the normalization of the term "autrice" (female author), a significant evolution from the hostile reception the word received when Dalva was born.
A Personal and Academic Commitment
The commitment to women's visibility is rooted in Ponce's own academic journey. Trained in philosophy and ethnology, she began a PhD in human sciences but ultimately chose not to become a research anthropologist. Her perspective on books and women's conditions shifted during fieldwork in a Maya hamlet in Chiapas, Mexico.
Confronted with restricted access to reading and the daily observation of Maya women holding immense knowledge but deprived of public speech, female fiction became a form of urgency for her. Upon her return to France, Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves acted as a trigger. Fascinated by its complex narrative construction, she sent a spontaneous application to its French publisher, Denoël, where she began as an intern.
Her anthropological training extends into her relationship with texts, which she sees as vectors of otherness. Nominated for publishing awards in 2026, she stated: "I see a library, I tell myself each little five centimeters there, it's an imagination, secrets, a life."
Consolidating Success
The autumn 2025 season marked a step forward for Dalva Editions, notably due to the commercial and critical success of the first novel Nourrices by Séverine Cressan. The book sold more than copies in hardcover. Ponce says she has drawn lessons from this experience, useful for best supporting emerging voices in bookstores. Managing both her own structure and the historic Robert Laffont catalog now requires a reorganization of production.
