Houellebecq, Michel

French author, born as Michel Thomas on the colonial island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. His parents fairly soon lost interest in him, and he was looked after by his maternal grandparents in Algeria. After his parents divorced in the early 1960s, he was sent to Paris where he grew up with his paternal grandmother whose maiden name he later was to use as a pseudonym. He trained as an agrarian technician, but also embarked upon a literary career in the mid-1980s, when his poetry was published in the magazine La Nouvelle Revue de Paris. Apart from novels and poetry, he has also written essays and worked as a filmmaker and film actor, photographer and singer. Early in the 21st century he left France and settled in Ireland and Spain, but returned to settle in France again in 2012.