Michel Houellebecq (French: [miʃɛl wɛlbɛk]; born Michel Thomas; 26 February 1956) is a French author, filmmaker, and poet. Having written poetry and a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, he published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994. Atomised followed in 1998, and Platform in 2001. He published a book of poems, The Art of Struggle, in 1996. After a publicity tour for Platform led to his being taken to court for inciting racial hatred, he moved to Ireland to write for several years. He currently resides in France. In 2010 he published the Prix Goncourt-winning La Carte et le Territoire (published the same year in English as The Map and the Territory), and in 2015, Submission.

Houellebecq was born in 1956 on the French island of Réunion, the son of Lucie Ceccaldi, a French doctor born in Algeria of Corsican descent, and René Thomas, a ski instructor and mountain guide. He lived in Algeria from the age of five months until 1961, with his maternal grandmother. His website gloomily states that his parents "lost interest in his existence pretty quickly" and at the age of six, he was sent to France to live with his paternal grandmother, a communist, while his mother left to live a hippie lifestyle in Brazil with her newly met boyfriend. His grandmother's maiden name was Houellebecq, which he took as his pen name. Later, he went to Lycée Henri Moissan, a high school at Meaux in the north-east of Paris, as a boarder. He then went to Lycée Chaptal in Paris to follow preparation courses in order to qualify for Grandes écoles (elite schools). He began attending the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon in 1975. He started a literary review called Karamazov and wrote poetry.