Born on 13 February 1903 in Liège / Belgium, Georges Simenon did not bother to finish his apprenticeship as a bookseller and instead began his career as a local reporter. Following a spell in Paris as the private secretary of a Marquis, he lived on his boat with which he went all the way to Lapland, writing a travel journal and the first Maigret novels in the process. An enormous zest for work and numerous changes of location characterised the next thirty years of his life. After that, he finally settled down on Lake Geneva where, having published 75 Maigret novels and more than 120 non-Maigret books, he decided that instead of novels he would now dictate extensive autobiographical works (such as the monumental ›Intimate Memoirs‹). He died in Lausanne on 4 September 1989.