Michel Houellebecq is a French novelist, poet and essayist; his birth year appears as 1956 in some reference sources and 1958 in others. Les Particules élémentaires (1998), published in English as Atomised, Plateforme (2001) and La Possibilité d'une île (2005) were each passed over for the Prix Goncourt, which he won in 2010 for La Carte et le territoire by seven votes to two. Soumission (Submission) went on sale on January 7, 2015, the day gunmen attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, whose cover that week caricatured him; the novel imagines an Islamist party winning the French presidency in 2022, and he was placed under police protection. "I don't think the Islam in my book is the kind people are afraid of," he said. Sérotonine followed in 2019 and Anéantir in 2022. The positions below are his own, stated in essays and interviews, not those of his characters.
Islam has put him in court and in dispute. In a 2001 interview he told the magazine Lire that "the most stupid religion is Islam." Muslim groups, among them the Paris mosque, sued him for incitement to racial hatred, and a Paris court acquitted him in October 2002. In a conversation with the philosopher Michel Onfray published in the magazine Front populaire in November 2022, he said, as franceinfo and AFP reported, that the wish of the French of long standing was not that Muslims assimilate but that they stop stealing from and attacking them, or else leave, and predicted shootings in mosques. The rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, Chems-eddine Hafiz, filed a complaint on December 28, 2022; after a meeting in January 2023 arranged by France's chief rabbi, Haïm Korsia, Houellebecq signed a text committing to rewrite the passages for the book version, and the rector suspended the complaint.
His clearest political statement is a January 2019 essay in Harper's Magazine, "Donald Trump Is a Good President." In it he wrote that France "will become totally independent once again when the European Union is dissolved (the sooner, the better)," welcomed Brexit, and said France should leave NATO. Responding to Trump's description of himself as a nationalist, he wrote: "Me too, precisely so." He praised Trump's protectionism, called free-market liberals "as fanatical as communists," and wrote that "a reduction in global trade is a desirable goal." He called Trump "pretty repulsive" on a personal level and wrote that "an authentic Christian conservative" would have been better for America. The same essay describes "the struggle against Islam" as one of the constants of European history and admires the persistence of Orthodox Christianity "in its own lands."
In May 2025 he received the Jerusalem International Book Forum's prize, telling the audience: "Whatever people think of my books, moral inquiry is what nourishes them and what waters them."
Michel Houellebecq is associated with National Populist. See the archetype