Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq (real surname Thomas) is a French writer and poet.

He was born on February 26, 1956, on Réunion Island, a French possession in the Indian Ocean. His father, a mountain guide, and his mother, an anesthesiologist, paid little attention to him after the birth of his sister. At first he was raised by his maternal grandparents, who lived in Algeria, and at the age of six he was taken in by his paternal grandmother, Henriette, an active supporter of the Communist Party. He had an excellent relationship with her; it was her surname that he later chose as his literary pseudonym.

At sixteen, Houellebecq discovered the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, to whose work he would devote a separate book nearly twenty years later. The future writer attended preparatory courses at the Lycée Chaptal in Paris in order to enter the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon in 1975. There he created the short-lived literary magazine Karamazov, for which he wrote several poems, and attempted to make an amateur film entitled Cristal de souffrance. In 1978 Houellebecq received a diploma in Ecology and Environmental Protection. He then enrolled in the cinematography department of the Louis Lumière National School, which he graduated from in 1981.

In the same year his son Étienne was born. There followed a period of unemployment and his divorce from his wife. All this caused him deep depression. From 1983 Houellebecq worked in Paris as a systems administrator, then for some time in the Ministry of Agriculture (this period of the writer’s life is reflected in his debut novel Whatever), and finally in the National Assembly.

Houellebecq began his literary career by writing poetry and essays. In 1991 he published his first books — the essay collection Staying Alive, devoted to the figure of the poet in the modern world, and a study of the work of the American writer and classic of horror literature Howard Phillips Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. A year later the poetry collection The Pursuit of Happiness appeared. His early works went largely unnoticed.

Houellebecq rose to fame with the publication of his first novel Whatever (1994