Georges Simenon

Who is Georges Simenon?

Georges Simenon was a Belgian writer born in Liège, one of the most prolific novelists of the twentieth century, credited with roughly two hundred novels published under his own name and many more under pseudonyms early in his career. He is best known as the creator of Commissaire Jules Maigret, the pipe-smoking Paris police detective who appeared in seventy-five novels and twenty-eight short stories published between 1931 and 1972, translated into dozens of languages and repeatedly adapted for film, radio, and television. Simenon began working as a journalist in Liège as a teenager before moving to Paris in 1922, where he wrote pulp fiction at extraordinary speed before turning to the Maigret series and to darker, psychologically probing standalone novels he called "romans durs" (hard novels), such as "The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By" and "Dirty Snow". Andre Gide and other literary contemporaries praised his spare, precise prose and psychological insight. He spent periods living in France, the United States, and Switzerland, where he died in 1989.

Sources: Pierre Assouline, Simenon: A Biography (1997) · Fonds Simenon, University of Liège archives · Georges Simenon, Maigret series (Presses de la Cite, 1931-1972)