Original version

BBC World Service schedule for American satellite radio and the Caribbean

BBC World Service Americas and the Caribbean

The Forum

Documentaries

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

The programme that explains the present by exploring the past

The programme that explains the present by exploring the past.

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa Schedule

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa

BBC World Service Australasia

BBC World Service Online

BBC World Service

BBC World Service South Asia

BBC World Service News Internet

BBC World Service Europe and the Middle East

BBC World Service West and Central Africa Schedule

BBC World Service West and Central Africa

BBC World Service East Asia

The Forum: Albert Camus: Embracing life’s absurdity

the writer Albert Camus

19/09/2019 GMT

Albert Camus: Embracing life’s absurdity

BBC World Service - The Forum, Albert Camus: Embracing life’s absurdity

The Stranger and other key works of Algeria’s great humanist Albert Camus

The intellectual journey of Algeria’s great novelist and philosopher Albert Camus.

‘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)

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Forum

Albert Camus: Embracing life’s absurdity

Genres

Formats

Brand

BBC World Service Americas and the Caribbean

About BBC World Service