South African bestselling author Wilbur Smith has died aged 88. His publisher reports that he died unexpectedly yesterday, in the presence of his wife in Cape Town, “after a morning of reading and writing”. The 49 books Smith wrote during his long career have sold more than 140 million copies worldwide. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, including Dutch.
Smith debuted in 1964 with the historical novel When the lion feeds, translated into Dutch as The gold of Natal. The book about a South African farmer’s son who joins a group of prospectors quickly became a bestseller and had fifteen sequels, charting 200 years of its protagonist’s family history.
Smith himself was born in Zambia in 1933, the son of a British family who, like his protagonist, grew up on a farm. During his studies at Rhodes University, his father talked him out of a career in journalism, after which he became an accountant – a job he hated so much that he decided to ignore the advice of his authoritarian father and start writing after all. .
Hunter, diver, climber
American thriller author Stephen King once called Smith the very best historical novelist. He was especially renowned for his landscape descriptions and the lifelike characters in his stories.
An avid hunter, diver, and mountaineer, as well as taking advantage of his pilot’s license, Smith said he enjoyed the intense research he did for his adventure novels. This is how he worked for his book Gold Mine several weeks in a South African gold mine and made many long journeys to do historical research.
In his autobiography On Leopard Rock Smith wrote in 2018 that he has had a fantastic life. “Hard times, lost marriages, working aimlessly for nights, but all in all it has given me a phenomenal, most fulfilling and beautiful life,” he wrote. “I want to be remembered as someone who brought joy to millions of people.”
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