Moreau, Marcel, 1933-2020

Marcel Moreau (16 April 1933 − 4 April 2020) was a Belgian writer. He was born in Boussu, a town in the mining region of Borinage in Hainaut Province, into a working-class environment. He described it as "a pure cultural void" with "a total absence of any cultural reference point". He lost his father at the age of 15, 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. Marcel Moreau 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. He was friends with such cultural figures as Roland Topor, Anaïs Nin, Jean Dubuffet and Jean Paulhan. Considered a marginal writer with an idiosyncratic style, he was the author of a considerable body of work. He died in Bobigny (a suburb of Paris), on 4 April 2020, of COVID-19 during the pandemic.