Wilbur Smith
Wilbur Addison Smith (9 January 1933 – 13 November 2021) was a Zambian-born British-South African novelist specialising in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries.
An accountant by training, he gained a film contract with his first published novel When the Lion Feeds. This encouraged him to become a full-time writer, and he developed three long chronicles of the South African experience which all became best-sellers. He acknowledged his publisher Charles Pick’s advice to “write about what you know best”, and his work takes in much authentic detail of the local hunting and mining way of life, along with the romance and conflict that goes with it.
By the time of his death in 2021 he had published 49 books of which he sold over 140 million copies, 24 million of them in Italy (by 2014)
Early life
Smith was born in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia, (now Zambia), as was his younger sister Adrienne to Elfreda (née Lawrence, 1913 – ) and Herbert James Smith. He was named after aviator Wilbur Wright
His father Herbert was a metal worker who opened a sheet metal factory and then created a 25,000-acre (10,000 ha) cattle ranch on the banks of the Kafue River near Mazabuka, by buying up a number of separate farms “My father was a tough man”, said Smith. “He was used to working with his hands and had massively developed arms from cutting metal. He was a boxer, a hunter, very much a man’s man. I don’t think he ever read a book in his life, including mine”.
Education
Smith attended boarding school at Cordwalles Preparatory School in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) While in Natal, he continued to be an avid reader and had the good fortune to have an English master who made him his protégé and would discuss the books Smith had read that week. Unlike Smith’s father and many others, the English master made it clear to Smith that being a bookworm was praiseworthy, rather than something to be ashamed of, and let Smith know that his writings showed great promise. He tutored Smith on how to achieve dramatic effects, to develop characters, and to keep a story moving forward