Michel Houellebecq was born on 26 February 1958 in the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion. His father was a mountaineer, his mother an anaesthetist, but he has claimed that both neglected him as a child. At six he was left with his paternal grandmother, a communist, and moved to Dicy in the Yonne region of rural France. He wanted to be an agronomist, and graduated with a diploma in agricultural engineering in 1980. In the same year he married and had a son a year later - but the following divorce led to a severe depression which required psychiatric treatment.

But his illness may have spurred his decision to start writing and attending poetry groups. In 1985 he met Michel Bulteau, director of the New Review of Paris, who was the first to publish his poems, and became a firm friend.

His first published book was Against The World, Against Life, a biography of American writer HP Lovecraft, which he followed with a collection of poems, The Pursuit Of Happiness, which gave him his first literary prize, the Tristan Tzara.

Houellebecq began to write in earnest in literary reviews and produced his first novel, Extension Du Domaine De La Lutte (The Struggle Spreads, published in the UK as ‘Whatever') in 1994. The story of a bored computer salesman who trains provincial civil servants was a major literary hit in France and promoted much discussion of its themes - the cheapening of intimate relationships and the coarsening of sex in a materialistic society. In 1998, he received France's Grand Prix National Des Lettres Jeunes Talents and in the same year published his second novel, Les Particules Elémentaires (Atomised). Exploring similar themes to ‘Whatever' - but at greater length and in more graphic detail – ‘Atomised' won the Prix Novembre and has now been translated into 25 languages.

He has since collaborated on the screen adaptation of ‘Whatever' with director Philippe Harel and released his first album, Presence Humaine, on which he sings a number of his poems to the music of Bertrand Burgalat. His last novel, Plateforme, in which he wrotes about the same topics as his former writings, has attracted its fair share of controversy - this time because of a perceived anti-Islamic bias.

In his books houellebecq writes about a characteristic property of human-beings and enlarges it to show its horribility. He also likes to provoke, which he does by his destructive stories about the hippy culture and the sexual revolution, the Islam and western individualist culture in general.

He has an extremely pessimistic view on human-beings in which Nietzsche's and schopenhauer's influences can be found. He thinks humans are determined by the society they live in. Mass tourism symbolizes for him the wrongness of our western society because it shows how by sociological theses the wants of people can be created.

Nowadays Houellebecq lives in Ireland, near Cork.