Albert Camus wrote in the shadow of fascism, war and ideological violence. His defence of truth, democratic dialogue and human limits remains strikingly relevant in today’s era of authoritarian politics and “post-truth” public debate.

Author and philosopher Albert Camus died in a car crash in 1960, aged just 46. But the existential, moral and political issues Camus’ writings address still trouble us today.

Born in colonial Algeria, Albert was the first member of the Camus family to read, let alone attend university. His father died before he turned one, his mother did housework to support her family. In the 1930s, he became a playwright, journalist and novelist. After moving to France in 1940, he joined the Resistance against Nazi occupation.

In 1942, Camus shot to fame with his novel  The Stranger, a dramatisation of the homicidal implications of modern  nihilism (the loss of a sense of meaning). That year, he wrote a disconcerting essay on the ancient  Myth of Sisyphus exploring the question of whether, in a world without God, suicide could be rationally justified.

In 1947,  _The Plague_, a novel about a city locked down for one year due to bubonic plague, enjoyed enormous success. In 1952, Camus published his longest philosophical work,  The Rebel, a powerful indictment of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century for their crimes against humanity. In 1957, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Camus’ writings urgently  addressed problems his own generation faced, which seem to be recurring in our times of increased alienation,  anxiety and  loss of  hope among many. Meanwhile, the rise of authoritarian movements around the world sounds echoes of the dictatorships The Plague and  The Rebel were written to warn future generations against.

The Stranger tells the story of Meursault, an emotionally detached French-Algerian “outsider” who is condemned to death for killing an Arab, but displays no remorse for his crime. He can only mouth “the sun, the sea” to explain his murderous violence.

After writing The Stranger, Camus became known as a “prophet of the absurd”.

Yet, he always insisted he should not be identified with his absurd anti-hero. Indeed, Camus’  unwanted “absurdist” fame has meant many dimensions of his work have been popularly passed over.

The loss of shared meaning as religious belief declined in the face of scientific........

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