Albert Camus

Albert Camus was a writer and philosopher born in Algeria, where he spent his youth. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. He was born on 7 November 1913 in Mondovi, present-day Dréan, near Annaba, and died on 4 January 1960 at Villeblevin, in France.

A year after his birth, his father, a cellar worker on a wine estate, died in the First World War.

His mother, whose family came from Menorca, then took her 2 sons to live with her own mother. They settled in Belcourt, now Belouizdad, a poor district of Algiers. The boy grew up there with very little money, but he did well at the Lycée Bugeaud and studied philosophy at the University of Algiers.

After his studies, Camus became a journalist. During the Second World War he ran Combat, a newspaper of the French Resistance, in Paris.

The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), his best-known novels, take place in Algiers and Oran. Many of his essays describe the light and the sea of the Algerian coast, above all at Tipasa.

Camus lost his life in a car accident and is buried at Lourmarin. His books are still read around the world.