On a Sunday morning in Paris, the life of Tama Leia looks, as it often does, like something from the pages of Vogue France. Matcha from Wild and the Moon. A pain au chocolat from the boulangerie on her street — the finest in the city, she will tell you, with the calm authority of someone who has done the research. A desk with several deadlines. Her French beau, who calls her the queen of Paris, is nearby. She does not dispute this. This year alone she has multiple titles forthcoming, French publishers to meet, and a film company producing work that critics have struggled to categorise and audiences have struggled to forget. Her films — produced under Étoile Sauvage — are whimsical and beautiful in the way only French cinema can be: ostriches wandering the Marais, Dior at blue hour on a Malibu shore. When Paris releases her, she and her beau retreat to their Maison de Campagne — a different world, devoted to family, to slow mornings, to the quiet pleasure of making a home. But for now there is the city. Every morning, the matcha. On Sundays, the pain au chocolat. The work continues.
On Fleur Bleue Publishing
You're currently in conversation with publishers in the UK, France, and the United States. How do you approach those conversations?
With great clarity. I built Fleur Bleue first because I understood something early that many writers learn too late — that you do not need anyone's permission to put your work into the world. I have already done that. The publishers I speak with now are not being asked to discover me. They are being invited into something I have already built, on terms that protect what I have created. Rights, creative control — these are not negotiable. What I bring to the table is a body of work with a distinct voice, a proven audience, and a very clear sense of what I will and will not give away.
Fleur Bleue Publishing. What does the name mean to you?
In French, fleur bleue describes a particular kind of person — romantic, unashamed of beauty. Someone who still believes. I chose it because that is what literature requires. You cannot write honestly about the world if you have stopped loving it.
On Paris & the Writing Life
Describe a writing morning on Rue Delambre.
Paris is still sleeping when I start dreaming on paper. That is my favourite hour. I love Paris — I love my life here. There is an intimacy to writing that I find nowhere else. The light comes in a particular way in the 14th. The 14th arrondissement has sheltered writers for a century. You feel that. You don't have to try to write here. You just do.
"Every film is a story in visual form. Every novel is a world the reader builds in their imagination. Story is story. What changes is only the language it chooses to speak."
— Tama Leia
Words & Images
The distinction between writer and filmmaker — one that preoccupies much of the literary world — is not a distinction Leia has ever found particularly meaningful. Every film is a story in visual form. Every novel is a world the reader builds in their imagination. Story is story. What changes is only the language it chooses to speak.
It is this conviction that makes Étoile Sauvage something other than a creative sidebar. The films are not promotional material for the novels. They are not adapted from them. They exist in the same universe — the same obsessions, the same eye, the same insistence on beauty as a serious subject — but they breathe differently. A novel gives you the interior. A film gives you the surface, which, in Leia's hands, turns out to be just as revealing.
The Books
The books have moved with a velocity that might seem improbable if the work were not so evidently deliberate. Seven titles between 2024 and 2026 — poetry, literary fiction, historical thriller — and at the end of this year, The Danish Crown Affair: her most structurally ambitious novel yet, in which her protagonist Chanel Laurent navigates the lethal corridors of Danish nobility, where decades of secrets and corruption converge into something that cannot be outrun. In 2027, The Beautiful American arrives — in English and in French simultaneously, the second time she will have published in both languages at once. It is, by any measure, a serious body of work, accumulating with the quiet confidence of someone who has always known exactly what she was building.
Fleur Bleue Publishing
Debut French Novel · 2026
Les Petits Poètes
French edition of Little Poets — rewritten for francophone readers
A novel about the collision of innocence and ambition. Where first love meets first art, and nothing is ever quite simple again.
2024
The Romantic
Her literary debut. Unflinching character studies through poetry — autobiographical threads woven into universal truths about love, betrayal, and human connection.
2024
Prada the Cat
Parisian life through the eyes of an extraordinary feline. Whimsical, sharp, and full of magical realism — a symphonic love letter to Paris.
2025
Little Poets
Young love, ambition, and power. Grey is torn from everything he knows to a strict boarding school — a sweeping tale of institutions that seek to break the artists they cannot control.
2025
Marmont & Me
Chanel Laurent navigates Old Hollywood glamour and the intoxicating atmosphere of the Chateau Marmont — and discovers that the freedom we crave can become the prison we create.
2026
The Danish Crown Affair
Chanel Laurent returns in a sophisticated thriller of Danish nobility, billion-dollar corruption, and literary conspiracy. Chess-precise plotting. Lethal stakes.
2027
The Beautiful American
1920s France. A widow assumes a male disguise — and the novels rejected under her name become bestsellers under his. Until she falls impossibly in love. Her most intoxicating novel yet.
2026
Les Petits Poètes · French Edition
The debut French novel from Fleur Bleue Publishing — rewritten, not translated, for francophone readers. Distribution to 5,000 French bookshops coming in 2026–2027.
On the Writing Process
You clearly love writing. But what does the actual process look like?
It begins with inspiration — a flood of it, usually. I write the entire plot, each act, in one sitting if I can. Then I zero in on the scenes that matter most, the ones the whole novel turns on. From there I build — draft by draft, day by day, the world taking shape slowly and then all at once. I know my characters completely before the reader ever meets them. I know their childhoods, their fears, the small things that define how they move through a room. Most of it never makes it onto the page — but the reader feels it. That depth is what makes a character real rather than functional. And I give each one a distinct voice — something particular to them, something that makes their every action inevitable once you understand who they are. Then comes the editing — reading backward, forward, out of order, in fragments. Every section has to hold its own weight.
"I read my work out of order, backward, forward, in fragments. If a section can't hold its own when standing alone, it hasn't earned its place in the whole."
— Tama Leia
Paris
Le Figaro
2025
An intimate portrait of her Paris home — morning rituals, private devotion, a private jet glimpsed in passing. Dressed in white, moving through rooms. Less a film than a feeling.
Paris
Musée Rodin
2025
An ode to eternal love, inspired by Lana Del Rey's "Young and Beautiful." Among classical statues, the film asks: what remains when physical beauty fades? The answer is rendered in marble and longing.
Paris
The Paris Affair
2025
Her dual existence as an American-French actress navigating life in France — the romance, the contradictions, the quiet moments between worlds.
Paris
Poésie
2026
A portrait of her atelier and home — Poésie magazines stacked high, her white fluffy cat, her beau, fragments of a world caught on camera.
Malibu
Blue Hour
2026
Dior swimsuits among white statues on the Malibu shore, reading the Los Angeles Times as blue light fades to dusk. The Pacific as backdrop, as mirror, as home.
Malibu
Cashmere Cologne
2026
On the Malibu shore in a white wetsuit with a white surfboard. The Pacific as eternal muse — clean, uncompromising, endlessly returning.
Malibu
Velvet Ocean
2026
Surfing in a sleek black wetsuit with Chanel emblazoned on the back — luxury meets athleticism, high fashion meets the raw power of the sea. A cinematic language that is simultaneously hyperreal and dreamlike.
Paris · Montmartre · Latest
An American in France
2026
Fragments of a Parisian life. A dress. A coffee. A newspaper. A fluffy white cat in the secret garden of Hôtel Particulier in Montmartre. Thirty-two seconds that feel like a beautiful dream you're not quite ready to leave.
Tama Leia on set
The Making of a Poet
Beyond the individual films, Leia and Étoile Sauvage have been developing an ongoing visual series — The Making of a Poet — that follows the landscapes shaping her creative identity. Love letters to a life lived in soft focus, spanning her Paris atelier, her Maison de Campagne, the Chateau Marmont, and the Pacific coast at dawn. Morning light spilling through her atelier like champagne. Coffee cups still holding yesterday's warmth. A poet for whom beauty is not a subject but a way of being.
On Building Worlds
Your films, your novels — they all feel like they come from the same place. What is that place?
I have always built worlds. As a child I imagined them so completely they felt real to me. That hasn't changed — it's just that now I can invite others in. People tell me my films feel like a beautiful escape, a world they were invited into and want more of. That is the greatest thing anyone can say to me. I am not just telling stories. I am building somewhere for people to go.
The measure of a world completely built is simple: the reader cannot leave it. Not even, as it turns out, for eye surgery. Leia's mother had eye surgery scheduled — and picked up Little Poets hoping to finish it beforehand. She stayed up until three in the morning reading. She hadn't yet finished when surgery day arrived. And then — in recovery, unwilling to wait — she finished it by magnifying glass. "She told me it was a masterpiece," Leia says, with the smile of someone who knows that particular word means more coming from that particular person. That is not a mother being kind. That is a reader being captured.
A Life in Paris
Describe your life in Paris when you are not writing.
Some days I walk — past the Luxembourg Gardens, through Saint-Germain, wherever the morning takes me. Other days we drive. Paris is generous either way. I love La Grande Épicerie de Paris — there is nowhere quite like it for beautiful things to eat, to discover, to bring home. On weekends I find myself in Le Marais, looking for beautiful things. There is a Japanese restaurant I love in Saint-Germain called Blueberry Maki Bar — the kind of place you return to again and again. My life here is simple, really. Cosy, devoted, mine. But living in Paris, even simply, is a very fine thing. Everything is gorgeous. Some days it feels less like a life and more like a novel I am living inside.
Ballet appears in your writing — and in your life. How did that love begin?
Ballet is something I have always adored. In another life I would have been a dancer. Paris simply gave me Garnier — which is something else entirely. To sit in the Paris Opera House, with friends, watching a performance — it is one of the great pleasures of this life. And it feeds the work. My novel The Danish Crown Affair is set between Paris and Copenhagen — it follows a prima ballerina who danced in the Royal Danish Ballet. The dancer's life I have always admired found its way onto the page instead.
The interview ends, as the best ones do, not with a declaration but with a quiet revelation. Leia mentions, almost in passing, that she has noticed something recently — that when she is in France, she thinks in French now. Not always. Not entirely. But enough. Enough to notice. It is perhaps the most Parisian thing she has said all morning — the kind of thing you only discover by accident, when the city has already made itself at home inside you without asking permission. L'Américaine de Paris. The name, it turns out, was always exactly right.
The Blue
Letter
Paris · London · New York
