Didier Eribon is a journalist and professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Human and Social Science at the University of Amiens. In 1999 and 2004 he directed the seminar Sociology of Homosexualities at the Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Sociales in Paris, the city where he currently resides. He first earned recognition for two books of interviews with Georges Dumézil (1987) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1988), and he is the author of the biography Michael Foucault (Harvard University Press, 1992) and the essays Insult and the Question of the Gay Self (Duke University Press, 2004) and Une morale du minoritaire [A morality of the minority] (Fayard, 2001).  

Notable in the genre of memoir are two key works recently translated into Catalan: Returning to Reims (Semiotext(e), 2013), an autobiographical essay in which the author tells of returning to his hometown after the death of his father and reflects on his origins in a working-class neighbourhood and the significance that made him able to move away to work on intellectual pursuits, and The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman (Semiotext(e), 2025), in which he reflects, based on his mother’s move into a care home, on the cruelty that comes with aging and the uncertainty facing elderly people from disadvantaged social classes. His work has profoundly influenced authors of younger generations, and has been adapted for theatre and cinema.