Michel Houellebecq

• Born: February 26, 1958
• Place of Birth: La Réunion Island, France

Biography

Michel Houellebecq was born February 26, 1958, on the French island of La Réunion. His father was a ski instructor, his mother, a doctor. His parents apparently paid little attention to him during his early years. When he was six years old, he was turned over to his paternal grandmother, whose family name he would later take. He grew up in poverty, with few resources except two large trunks full of books. There were classics, anthologies, and digests, which he avidly read many times. As a boy, he lived in several locations near Paris. He entered a boarding school at Meaux where he stayed for six years; then he took preparatory courses before moving on to higher education. He earned a degree in agricultural engineering in 1980 and married one of his sister’s classmates that same year. The couple had a son in 1981 but divorced four years later.

Houellebecq experienced a long period of unemployment during his marriage and struggled with depression following his divorce, causing him to be admitted several times to a psychiatric facility. He finally found work as an administrative secretary at the French National Assembly.

He became serious about writing around the age of twenty, when he began associating with poets. His first poems were published in the Nouvelle Revue de Paris. The editor was Michel Bulteau, whom he met in 1985 and with whom he established a long friendship. Bulteau was instrumental in persuading Houellebecq to write a book for a series he was creating, and Houellebecq wrote H. P. Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie (1991). In 1992, a collection of his poems entitled La Poursuite du bonheur: Poemes (1991) won the Prix Tristan Tzara.

His first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994; Whatever, 1999), increased his readership and was translated into several languages. He also collaborated on a screenplay for Whatever in 1999 with director Philippe Harel. Le Sens du combat (1996), his third collection of poems, won the Prix Flore in 1996.

The year 1998 was a pivotal one for Houellebecq. He won the Grand Prix national des Lettres Jeunes Talents for the entirety of his work, and he published two books: Interventions, a collection of articles and critical pieces, and Les Particules élémentaires (Atomised, 2000), his second novel. Atomised won the Prix Novembre and has since been translated into some twenty-five languages. He also married his second wife that year.

In 2000, Houllebecq added singing to his artistic ambitions, recording an album, Présence humaine, in which he sang some of his poems put to music by Bertrand Burgalat. In 2005 Houllebecq published another novel, La Possibilité d’une île (The Possibility of an Island, 2005). In 2010, he published the novel La Carte et Le Territoire (The Map and the Territory, 2012) In 2015, Houellebecq published Soumission (Submission, 2015).

This was followed by En présence de Schopenhauer, or In the Presence of Schopenhauer, a monography published in 2017. In 2019, Houllebecq published Sérotonine, or Seratonin, a novel about an agricultural scientist who is taking the antidepressant seratonin when he visits an old friend. The friend takes part in a farmers' rights protest, killing himself in the process. That same year, Houllebecq also appeared as himself in the French comedy Thalasso. In 2022, he played a doctor in the French film Rumba la vie. He also published Anéantir, a 700-page novel about a near-future France in steep decline because of moral decay and cyberterrorism. The English translation, Annihilation, was published in 2024. In that year, he appeared in the film Dans la peau de Blanche Houellebecq, or Being Blanche Houllebecq, in which he takes part in a look-alike contest in Guadeloupe.

Houllebecq’s controversial work has led to debates, critiques, and even a trial. He was charged with provoking racial hatred by referring to Islam as “the most stupid religion” during an interview for a literary magazine. He responded that he also felt Christianity and Judaism were based on scriptures which preached hate, but that attacking a religion did not mean he was attacking its followers. He was found not guilty by a three-judge panel. Houellebecq now lives in Ireland.

Hunnewell, Susannah. "Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Fiction No. 206." Paris Review, Fall 2010, www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.

Mason, Wyatt. "Why France’s Most Controversial Novelist Is Also Its Most Celebrated." New York Times, 9 Oct. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/magazine/michel-houellebecq-france-profile.html. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.

"Michel Houellebecq." European Graduate School, egs.edu/biography/michel-houellebecq/. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.

"Michel Houllebecq." IMDb, www.imdb.com/name/nm0396391/bio/. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.