Simon Leys

Pierre Ryckmans (28 September 1935 – 11 August 2014), better known by his pen name Simon Leys, was a Belgian-Australian writer, essayist and literary critic, translator, art historian, sinologist, and university professor, who lived in Australia from 1970. His work particularly focused on the politics and traditional culture of China, calligraphy, French and English literature, the commercialization of universities, and nautical fiction. Through the publication of his trilogy Les Habits neufs du président Mao (1971), Ombres chinoises (1974) and Images brisées (1976), he was one of the first intellectuals to denounce the Cultural Revolution in China and the idolizing of Mao in the West.

Pierre Ryckmans was born at Uccle, an upper-middle-class district of Brussels, to a prominent Belgian family living in a house on Avenue des Aubépines. He was the son of a publisher, the grandson of Alfonse Ryckmans, an Antwerp alderman and vice president of the Senate, the nephew of Pierre Ryckmans, a governor general of the Belgian Congo, and Gonzague Ryckmans, a professor at the Université catholique de Louvain and a recognized expert of Arabic epigraphy.

He attended the Servites de Marie primary school near his home, then studied Greek and Latin humanities at the Cardinal Mercier diocesan school in Braine-l'Alleud. There, one of his teachers, abbé Voussure, "finished ingraining in him an unwavering Christian faith."