Michel Houellebecq

Houellebecq was born on Réunion and effectively abandoned by both parents as a small child, raised instead by his grandmother, whose surname he later took as his pen name. He trained as an agricultural engineer and worked in computer support for the French National Assembly before Whatever (1994) and then The Elementary Particles established him as French fiction's most deliberately unpleasant provocateur; the latter got him expelled from a writers' association over its content and made him internationally notorious.

He won the Prix Goncourt in 2010 for The Map and the Territory, and Submission, imagining France electing an Islamist president, was published the same morning gunmen attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices, an editor of which had drawn Houellebecq's caricature that week. He has continued writing in the same flat, clinical register, dividing his time between France and Ireland.