Happy Birthday: Alain de Botton FRSL (born 20 December 1969) is a Swiss-born British author and public speaker. His books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. He published Essays in Love (1993), which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), Status Anxiety (2004), and The Architecture of Happiness (2006).

He co-founded The School of Life in 2008 and Living Architecture in 2009. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011. In 2015, he was awarded "The Fellowship of Schopenhauer", an annual writers' award from the Melbourne Writers Festival, for that work.

De Botton was born in Zürich, the son of Jacqueline (née Burgauer) and Gilbert de Botton. Gilbert was born in Alexandria, Egypt, but went to live and work in Switzerland, where he co-founded an investment firm, Global Asset Management; his family was estimated to have been worth £234 million in 1999.

Alain de Botton's Swiss-born mother was Ashkenazi, and his father was from a Sephardic Jewish family from the town of Boton in Castile and León. De Botton's ancestors include Abraham de Boton. De Botton's paternal grandmother was Yolande Harmer, a Jewish-Egyptian journalist who spied for Israel and died in Jerusalem.

He has one sister, Miel, and they received a secular upbringing. Alain spent the first twelve years of his life in Switzerland where he was brought up speaking French and German.