Michel Onfray was born in 1959 in the village of Argentan near Caen where he still lives. A high-school philosophy teacher for 20 years, he resigned from the state education sector and in 2002 set up the People's University in Caen. His twenty books map out a theory of hedonism: some celebrate the senses - smell, taste and the visual; others formulate a contemporary atheist ethics. He is currently at work on a six-volume alternative history of philosophy of which the first two volumes have been published.
