Born Feb. 13, 1903, in Liège, Belgium. French writer. Member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature (Brussels) since 1951.

Simenon began publishing in 1919. His novel The Strange Case of Peter the Lett (1931) was the first in a series of now world-famous detective novels and novellas centered on the police inspector Maigret. In these works, including Maigret Travels (1958; Russian translation, 1967) and Maigret and the Tramp (1963; Russian translation, 1966), attention is devoted not so much to the crimes themselves as to investigation of human character and of the causes of the crimes. Simenon depicts the tragic fate of people in the contemporary bourgeois world, their isolation, and their painful efforts to find a way out of their predicament; he also portrays the disintegration of the bourgeois family. These themes are found in the sociopsychological novels Four Days of a Poor Man (1949; Russian translation, 1968), The President (1958; Russian translation, I960), and The Prison (1968; Russian translation, 1968) and in Simenon’s 200th novel, the anniversary work There Are Still Hazelnut Trees (1969). Simenon has also written the autobiographical I Remember (1945), Pedigree (1948), and Letter to My Mother (1974).