Wilbur Smith

Famed for his sweeping saga following the Courtney family, Wilbur Smith brought tales of adventure imbued with his knowledge of Africa to readers around the world in a writing career that spanned almost 60 years. ...

Born in 1933 in what was then Northern Rhodesia, Wilbur was raised with his younger sister on a cattle ranch, where roaming the bush and hunting were his main pastimes – until evening came and, encouraged by his mother, he indulged a love of reading. Fiction proved to be a refuge for him throughout the ten brutal years he spent at boarding schools in South Africa and he intended to become a writer but his father’s advice to ‘get a real job’ prevailed. In 1954 Wilbur complete a degree in commerce and worked for Goodyear before an ill-fated partnership with his father to manufacture sheet metal led him to take employment as tax accountant with the Inland Revenue.

During this time Smith wrote his first novel, 1964’s When the Lion Feeds. Centring on brothers Sean and Garrick Courtney, the narrative is notable for its evocation of the farming world he knew so well and garnered an advance from Charles Pick, the MD of William Heinemann, that was the equivalent of two years’ income. The money allowed Smith the freedom to move to a caravan in Zimbabwe’s Inyanga Mountains and write the sequel, The Sound of Thunder. A string of successful standalone novels followed before he returned to the Courtneys, developing their story into a 24-book series that follows the family, and Africa’s history, over three centuries. Such was the demand for the next instalments that from 2015 Smith engaged co-authors, most notably David Churchill and Tom Harper, to help keep his readers satisfied.

After a life that encompassed big game hunting, learning to fly and scuba dive, managing a game reserve, developing land in the Seychelles and establishing a charity to promote adventure writing, Smith died in 2021 in Cape Town, leaving behind the outlines and partially completed manuscripts for several more novels.