The Forum

‘There is no sun without shadows, and it is essential to know the night,’ the words of Albert Camus, a writer whose exploration of the absurd nature of the human condition made him a literary and intellectual icon. Camus was born in Algeria but is celebrated in France as one of its great twentieth-century novelists and philosophers. His first publishing success, The Stranger, focused on the absurdity of existence but in his later works, including The Plague and The Rebel, he developed his thoughts on the human instinct to revolt. But who was Albert Camus? How far were his ideas shaped by his Algerian upbringing and by the turbulent political times he lived through in the 1940s and '50s? Bridget Kendall explores these questions with three Camus experts: Nabil Boudraa, Algerian professor of French and Francophone Studies at Oregon State University, Eve Morisi, professor of French at Oxford University and Samantha Novello, research fellow in Political Philosophy at Verona University. (Photo: Albert Camus Credit: Kurt Hutton/Getty Images)