Simon, Claude

Claude Simon was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, where his father was an officer in the French colonial army. After his father was killed in the First World War, Claude Simon was raised by his mother's family in Salses, near Perpignan. He was educated in Paris, Oxford and Cambridge and then returned to Paris where he enrolled at an art school, the Academie André Lhote, only to discover that he did not want to become a painter.