Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq (born Michel Thomas, 26 February 1956 or 1958) is a French author of novels, poems and essays, as well as an occasional actor, filmmaker and singer.

His first book was a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft.

Houellebecq was born in 1956 on the French island of Réunion, the son of Lucie Ceccaldi, a French physician born in Algeria of Corsican descent, and René Thomas, a ski instructor and mountain guide.

He lived in Algeria from the age of five months until 1961, with his maternal grandmother.

In a lengthy autobiographical article published on his website (now defunct), he states that his parents "lost interest in [his] existence pretty quickly", and at the age of six, he was sent to France to live with his paternal grandmother, a communist, while his mother left to live a hippie lifestyle in Brazil with her recent boyfriend.

His grandmother's maiden name was Houellebecq, which he took as his pen name.

Later, he went to Lycée Henri Moissan, a high school at Meaux north-east of Paris, as a boarder.

He then went to Lycée Chaptal in Paris to follow preparation courses in order to qualify for grandes écoles (elite schools).

He began attending the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon in 1975.

He started a literary review called Karamazov (named after Fyodor Dostoevsky's last novel) and wrote poetry.

He graduated in 1980, married and had a son; then he divorced, and became depressed.

Houellebecq's first poems appeared in 1985 in the magazine La Nouvelle Revue.

Throughout the 1990s, Houellebecq published several books of poetry, including Le sens du combat in 1996 (translated as The Art of Struggle, which, in a 2005 video interview for the magazine Les Inrockuptibles, he cited as his most accomplished book to date, the one he would usually choose if compelled to read whatever he wanted among his published works), and articles in magazines (such as Les Inrockuptibles) or more confidential literary publications (such as L'Infini edited by Philippe Sollers).

Six years later, in 1991, he published a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, a teenage passion, with the programmatic subtitle Against the World, Against Life.

Houellebecq published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994.

Meanwhile, he worked as a computer administrator in Paris, including at the French National Assembly, before he became the so-called "pop star of the single generation", starting to gain fame in 1994 with his debut novel Extension du domaine de la lutte, published by Maurice Nadeau (translated in English by Paul Hammond and published as Whatever).

It reads as a first-person narrative, alternating between realistic accounts of the (unnamed) protagonist's bleak and solitary life as a computer programmer, and his idiosyncratic musings about society, some of which are presented in the form of "animal fictions"; he teams up with an even more desperate colleague (he is a virgin at the age of 28) who later gets killed in a car accident, which triggers the narrator's mental breakdown and eventual admission in a psychiatric hospital; even there, he theorizes about his condition being the direct result of the contemporary social configuration, rather than a personal failure or mental illness.

He has published several books of poetry, including The Art of Struggle in 1996.

His second novel, Les Particules Élémentaires (translated by Frank Wynne and published in the English-speaking world as Atomised in the UK, or The Elementary Particles in the US) was a breakthrough, bringing him national and soon international fame and controversy for its intricate mix of brutally honest social commentary and pornographic depictions (two years earlier, in 1996, while working on that novel, being interviewed by Andrew Hussey, he had presciently said : "It will either destroy me or make me famous." ) It narrates the fate of two half brothers who grew up in the troubled 1960s: Michel Djerzinski, who became a prominent biologist, highly successful as a scientist but utterly withdrawn and depressed, and Bruno Clément, a French teacher, deeply disturbed and obsessed by sex; Djerzinski eventually triggers what is labelled as the "third metaphysical mutation" by retro-engineering the human species into immortal neo-humans.

His next novel, Atomised, published in 1998, brought him international fame as well as controversy.

He married his second wife, Marie-Pierre Gauthier, in 1998.

Most of those texts were later collected in Interventions (1998, expanded in 2009 and 2020).

At that time, he lived at the same address as fellow writer Marc-Édouard Nabe, at 103, rue de la Convention in Paris.

The book won the 1998 Prix Novembre (which was renamed Prix Décembre, following the resignation of its founder who disapproved of the prize being given to Houellebecq), missing the more prestigious Prix Goncourt for which it was the favourite.

The novel became an instant "nihilistic classic" and was mostly praised for the boldness of its ideas and thought-provoking qualities, although it was also heavily criticized for its relentless bleakness and vivid depictions of racism, paedophilia, torture, as well as for being an apology for eugenics (Michiko Kakutani described it in The New York Times as "a deeply repugnant read" ).

Platform followed in 2001.

An offhand remark about Islam during a publicity tour for his 2001 novel Platform led to Houellebecq being taken to court for inciting racial hatred (he was eventually cleared of all charges).

He subsequently moved to Ireland for several years, before moving back to France, where he currently resides.

The novel won Houellebecq (along with his translator, Frank Wynne) the International Dublin Literary Award in 2002.

Nabe wrote about this proximity in Le Vingt-Septième Livre (2006), comparing both neighbours' careers and the way their writings were met by critics and audiences.

In 2010, he published The Map and the Territory, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt.

They divorced in 2010.

He was described in 2015 as "France’s biggest literary export and, some say, greatest living writer."

In 2015, his next novel, Submission, sparked another controversy for its depiction of Islam.

He was also recently accused of plagiarism concerning Submission.

Anéantir was published in 2022.

A short poetical essay named Rester vivant : méthode (To Stay Alive) appeared the same year, dealing with the art of writing as a way of life – or rather, a way of not-dying and being able to write in spite of apathy and disgust for life (a film adaptation was made in 2016).

It was followed by his first collection of poetry, La poursuite du bonheur (The pursuit of happiness).

In a 2017 DW article he is dubbed the "undisputed star, and enfant terrible, of modern French literature".

His third marriage was in September 2018 to Qianyun Lysis Li, a Chinese woman 34 years his junior, and a student of his works.