Georges Joseph Christian Simenon was born on 13.02.1903, the eldest son of the ill-paid accountant Desire Simenon and his wife Henriette in Liege, the cultural center of the Walloon region of Belgium.

First, Georges attended a Catholic primary school and then a Jesuit college. Because his father worked as a low-paid accountant and his mother went about any professional activity, the circumstances in which Georges Simon grew up were modest. This situation changed only after the family moved into a house in the Rue de la Loi, and now took in students.

These students, who came from Poland, Romania or Russia, led to better family relationships and through these students Georges Simenon came into contact with books by Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Gorky. When his father suffered a heart attack, George left school in order to begin an apprenticeship.

First, he began training as a bookseller, from which he was released after a few weeks already. Je subsequently started training as a confectioner, also ending it after a short time, after which Georges Simenon began working as a local reporter at the Gazette de Liege. Here he was in charge of the police reports.

In 1920, just 17 years old, Georges Simenon published his first novel under the name of Georges Sim. In Liege, he got to know the painter Simon Regine Renchon and became engaged in 1921 with her. In 1922, he moved with his fiancee from Liege to Paris, where he worked as a private secretary and traveling companion of the wealthy Marquis de Tracy.

In 1923, Georges and Regine got married and in 1925 Georges Simenon undertook regularly publishing stories to write so-called popular literature. This activity went on for eight years, where he more than 200 books under 20 different names wrote (pseudonyms).

This activity provided him some financial security, which enabled him to take trips and see the world. In 1928, Simenon sailed with his wife and a housekeeper during the summer on his own boat, "Ginette", on France's rivers and canals and left a year later to build the boat "Ostrogoth". With this boat followed trips to the Netherlands, Norway and Belgium.

In 1929, Simon's first book appeared under his own name, the novel in which Maigret first conducts an investigation. However, the Paris Commissioner had already appeared in the public eye with four other stories that Simenon published under a pseudonym. The former workaholic wrote some up to 80 pages a day and part of this novel originated in a cafe in the Dutch province of Groningen.

In 1934/35, the writer undertook a world tour with his wife that took them from New York to Africa via Panama, Colombia, the Galapagos Islands and Tahiti. In 1939, Simon's son, Marc, was born. During the occupation, the family remained in France and the writer published further very successful novels about his Parisian Inspector Maigret. The police investigators was also well received on the screen, so after the occupation 9 adaptations had already been shot.

After the war, the family came through Canada to Tucson in the US state of Arizona, where they lived then. Simenon hired Denyse Ouimet as his secretary. In 1948 their son John was born, and he divorced from his wife Regine the year after. In the same year, the writer married Denyse and the couple lived in the coming years in the US state of Connecticut, where in 1952 they had a daughter, Marie-Jo. In 1955, George Simon and his family moved back to the Europe residence in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Lake Geneva, where their son, Pierre, was born in 1959.

In 1966, George Simon received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, an association of American crime writers. In 1973, the famous writer moved gradually back and was awarded the Grand Master by the Swedish Crime Academy.

George Simon wrote more than 400 novels in his life, which have been translated in over 60 languages ??and sold over 500 million copies and is one of the most widely read authors in the world. Film and television had a great interest in Maigret, so in 1941 many of his adventures have been filmed, with Jean Gabin (from 1949) and Jean Rechard (from 1967), the most famous performer Jules Maigret

George Simenon died on 04.09.1989 at the age of 86 years to cancer in Lausanne.