Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq is a French author known for his 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 published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994. His next novel, Atomised, published in 1998, brought him international fame as well as controversy. Platform followed in 2001. He published several books of poetry, including The Art of Struggle, in 1996.

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. He was described in 2015 as "France’s biggest literary export and, some say, greatest living writer." In a 2017 DW article, he is dubbed the "undisputed star, and enfant terrible, of modern French literature."

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

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.[citation needed] In a lengthy autobiographical article published on his website (now defunct), he states that his parents "lost interest in [his] existence pretty quickly." 

At age 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, as a boarder, he went to Lycée Henri Moissan, a high school at Meaux northeast of Paris. 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.

He married his second wife, Marie-Pierre Gauthier, in 1998. They divorced in 2010. His third marriage was in September 2018 to Qianyun Lysis Li, a Chinese woman 34 years his junior and a student of his works.