Marcel Moreau – a fancophone Belgian writer – died on 4 April, 2020 due to COVID-19.
Moreau was born in Boussu, a town in the mining region of Borinage, in the Hainaut Province, 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.
In 1963 he published his first novel, Quintes, notably praised by Simone de Beauvoir.
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 April 4,2020, of COVID-19 during the pandemic.