Did you know that the world's two most translated French authors are Belgian?

27/06/2016

The two French-speaking Belgian authors that are most translated worldwide are Hergé and Georges Simenon.

Hergé, a pseudonym of George Remi who was born in 1927 in Etterbeek, and died in 1983 in Woluwé-Saint-Lambert, was a Belgian comic strip author, famous worldwide for The Adventures of Tintin. Hergé was one of the first French authors to use the style of the American comics with speech bubbles, and is consequently considered to be the founding father of the European comic strip.

Georges Simenon was a French-speaking Belgian writer born in Liège in 1903.  He died in Lausanne in 1989. Known primarily for his Maigret detective novels, Georges Simenon actually wrote many more works. Indeed, he was responsible for 193 novels, 158 novellas, several autobiographical works and reports and articles published in his name along with several other novels and novellas published under pseudonyms. He is the world's most-read Belgian author; cumulative prints of his books account for 550 million copies. He was selected as one of the "One Hundred Walloons of the Century" by the Jules Destrée Institute in 1995.