Albert Memmi (Arabic: ألبير ممّي; 15 December 1920 – 22 May 2020) was a French-Tunisian writer and essayist of Tunisian Jewish origins. A prominent intellectual, his nonfiction books and novels explored his complex identity as an anti-imperialist, deeply related to his ardent Zionism. He viewed Zionism as a form of "anti-colonialism."

Memmi was born in Tunis, French Tunisia in December 1920, one of 13 children of Tunisian Jewish Berber Maïra (or Marguerite) Sarfati and Tunisian-Italian Jewish Fradji (or Fraji, or François) Memmi, a saddle maker. He grew up speaking French and Tunisian-Judeo-Arabic. During the Nazi occupation of Tunisia, Memmi was imprisoned in a forced labor camp from which he later escaped.

Memmi started Hebrew school when he was 4. He was educated in French primary schools, and continued his secondary studies at the prestigious Lycée Carnot de Tunis in Tunis, where he graduated in 1939. During World War II, he was studying philosophy at the University of Algiers when France's collaborationist Vichy regime implemented anti-Semitic laws. As a result, he was expelled from the university and subsequently sent to a labor camp in eastern Tunisia. After the war, Memmi resumed his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and married Marie-Germaine Dubach, a French Catholic, with whom he had three children. The family returned to Tunis in 1951, where Memmi taught high school.

Memmi became a professor at the Sorbonne and earned his doctorate there in 1970. In 1975, he was appointed as a director of the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences. He also held positions at the École des hautes études commerciales and at the University of Nanterre.

Despite his support for Tunisian independence, once Tunisia achieved independence in 1956, Memmi moved to France. Memmi wrote about his conflicted sense of identity in The Pillar of Salt (1953):

I am a Tunisian, but of French culture. I am Tunisian, but Jewish, which means that I am politically and socially an outcast. I speak the language of the country with a particular accent and emotionally I have nothing in common with Muslims. I am a Jew who has broken with the Jewish religion and the ghetto, is ignorant of Jewish culture and detests the middle class.

He died in May 2020, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, at the age of 99.

Memmi found himself at the crossroads of three cultures, and based his work on the difficulty of finding a balance between the East and the West.