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.

[1] Pierre Ryckmans was born in Uccle, an upper-middle-class district of Brussels, to a prominent Belgian family living in a house on Avenue des Aubépines.

[3] There he studied under the guidance of Puru, a cousin of Puyi, the last emperor, and did some research for his future PhD dissertation on Shitao, a Chinese painter at the time of the Qing empire.

First, thanks to the intervention of Eurasian writer Han Suyin,[8] he was able to take up a part-time student and teaching job at Nanyang University in Singapore.

[10] He also gleaned information from China News Analysis, a weekly publication produced in Hong Kong by the Jesuit scholar Father László Ladány.

[13] René Viénet, who took the view that Chinese press reports on the Cultural Revolution were less sanitized than the writings of Western journalists and sinologists, obtained Pierre Ryckmans's agreement for his essay Les Habits neufs du président Mao to be published in Paris by Champ Libre, a publishing house run by Gérard Lebovici.

[10][14] For his PhD thesis, Ryckmans chose to translate and comment on a masterpiece of the history of Chinese art, the treatise on painting by Shitao.

[4] It was published in 1970 by the Institut Belge des Hautes Etudes Chinoises in Brussels, under the title Propos sur la peinture du moine Citrouille-amère de Shitao.

He chose "Simon" as his first name, a reference to the original name of the Apostle Peter, and "Leys" as his second name, a tribute to the main character of Victor Segalen's René Leys published in 1922, in which a Belgian teenager residing in Peking in the final days of the Qing Dynasty entertains his employer with accounts of the intrigues and conspiracies taking place behind the walls of the imperial palace.

[1] In 1971, on the advice of his publisher, he decided to adopt a pseudonym before the release of Les habits neufs du président Mao, in order to avoid the risk of becoming a persona non grata in the People's Republic of China.

[26] During the 1970s these books by Ryckmans provoked intense hostility among many Western intellectuals,[27][28] particularly the French Maoists associated with the journal Tel Quel (such as Philippe Sollers) and attracted attacks from daily newspapers such as Le Monde.