Michel Butor (born on September 14, 1926)

French post-World War II writer.

Michel Marie Francois Butor was born in Mons-en-Baroeul. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt, Manchester, Salonika, the United States, and Geneva. He has won many literary awards for his work, including the Prix Apollo, the Prix Fénéon and the Prix Renaudot.

Journalists and critics associated his novels with the "nouveau roman," but Butor himself has long (and rightly) resisted that association. The main point of similarity is a general one: like the exponents of the "nouveau roman," he can be described as an experimental writer, and his early books were indeed in the tradition of the novel. La Modification, for instance, is written entirely in the second person.

For many decades now he has chosen to work in many other forms, from essays to poetry to artist's books to such unclassifiable works as Mobile. Literature, painting, and travel are subjects particularly dear to him. Part of the fascination of his writing is the way it combines the rigorous symmetries that led to Roland Barthes' praise of him as an epitome of structuralism (exemplified, for instance, by the architectural scheme of Passage de Milan or the calendrical structure of L'emploi du temps) with a lyrical sensibility more akin to Baudelaire than to Robbe-Grillet.