Marcel Moreau

Marcel Moreau is a francophone Belgian writer born in 1933 in Boussu, a town in the mining region of Borinage in the province of Hainaut.

Biography

Moreau was born into a working-class environment in which there was, as he put it himself, a “[…] pure cultural void, […] a total absence of any cultural reference point”. He lost his father at the age of fifteen, and abandoned his studies a short time later. He worked in various trades before becoming an accountant’s assistant in Brussels for the newspaper Le Peuple. In 1955 he became a proof-reader for the daily Le Soir. He married in 1957 and fathered two children. In 1963 he published his first novel, Quintes, notably praised by Simone de Beauvoir. Then followed Bannière de bave (Dribble Banner, 1965), La terre infestée d'hommes (Earth Infested with Men, 1966) and Le chant des paroxysmes (The Sound of Paroxysms, 1967). He moved to Paris in 1968, where he continued proof-reading. He worked for Alpha Encyclopédie, then for Le Parisien in 1971, and later for Le Figaro, until 1989. He travelled widely, to the USSR, India, Cameroon, China, Iran, Nepal, Canada, Mexico, the United States. His has been friends with such cultural figures as Roland Topor, Anaïs Nin, Jean Dubuffet and Jean Paulhan.

Considered a marginal writer with an idiosyncratic style, he is the author of a considerable body of work.

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