Born in 1903, in Liège, Belgium, Simenon became a newspaper reporter to support his family. In 1922 he moved to Paris to seek his fortune as a writer and within five years he had established himself as a writer of popular fiction (writing under various pseudonyms).

In 1931 he published his first novels under his own name, launching the Maigret series on 20 Februrary, 1931 with a huge ball (the ‘bal anthropométrique') that made the national newspapers and secured Simenon’s popular fame.

Over the next four decades he continued to write an average of four to five novels a year, alternating between the much-loved Maigret detective novels and his deeper ‘romans durs’. He won literary acclaim and was elected to the Belgian Académie Royale. In 1952 he was elected as President of the Mystery Writers of America, subsequently receiving the Legion of Honour in New York and was the President of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960.

A great self-publicist and adventurer, he became a legend in his own right for his public and private life as much as for his work. He spent his life traveling the world, visiting almost every continent and living in Belgium, France, America and Switzerland. He was married twice, and was a devoted father of four children.

In 1973 he publicly announced that he would write no more novels and started to dictate his daily thoughts, which eventually ran to twenty-two volumes. In 1981, he published his Intimate Memoirs and then spent his last years as a semi-recluse and died peacefully at his home in Lausanne at the age of 86 on September 4th, 1989.

In 2000 Simenon was voted one of the five most important authors writing in the French language of the Twentieth Century. Simenon remains an institution throughout Europe.