A Belgian francophone writer, born in Brussels in 1939 to a journalist father and a biologist mother, and a member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature since 1989. An avid reader from his earliest years, marked forever by Kafka’s oeuvre, and stimulated into politics by the war in Algeria, he studied at the Etterbeek Athénée, then at the Free University of Brussels where he picked up a doctorate in law. Hardly had his university education terminated than he tackled head on several activities: that of a citizen-jurist – attached to human rights everywhere in the world, that of a Professor of comparative literature at the Higher National Institute of Performing Arts (INSAS), and that of a prolific author: numerous publications in Belgian and foreign journals, literary chronicles in Le Soir newspaper and, above all, novels which have become landmarks. Les Bons Offices (1974) and Terre d'asile (1978) are amongst their ranks, as well as Les Éblouissements, which won the Médicis Prize inn 1987. But it was, in 1995, Une paix royale which would have the greatest public impact, with the court case instigated against its author by Princess Lilian de Réthy, the second wife of King Léopold III, and Prince Alexandre. It is an ambitious work, mixing personal memories, historical reality and fiction, with as a background the thorny ‘Royal Question’ which stirred Belgian at the end of the Second World War. As in the previous novels, the writing in it is haunted by History, a matrix of apocalypses (Auschwitz as the major reference) from which we can only emerge unscathed with a heightened moral conscience, a refusal of all oppression and literature’s powers of dissuasion.