Maurice Gilliams was born in 1900 in Antwerp, Belgium, where he lived for the rest of his life until 1982. In Flanders and the Netherlands, Gilliams is considered to be one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, even though his entire oeuvre-with only sixty-eight poems in total-is contained in just one volume, a book he entitled Vita Brevis ("short life" in Latin, but also suggesting the wish for an ars longa, a "lasting art").