Johannesburg – Legendary South African author Wilbur Smith has passed away unexpectedly at his Cape Town home on Saturday afternoon.
According to Smith’s website, the author passed away after a morning of reading and writing with his wife Niso by his side.
Smith’s novels gripped readers for over half a century, selling over 140 million copies worldwide in more than thirty languages.
Smith was 88-years-old.
His bestselling Courtney Series, the longest running in publishing history, follows the Courtney family’s adventures across the world, spanning generations and three centuries, through critical periods from the dawn of colonial Africa to the American Civil War, and to the apartheid era in South Africa.
In the 49 novels Smith has published to date, he has transported his readers to gold mines in South Africa, piracy on the Indian Ocean, buried treasure on tropical islands, conflict in Arabia and Khartoum, ancient Egypt, World War Two Germany and Paris, India, the Americas and the Antarctic, encountering ruthless diamond and slave traders and big game hunters in the jungles and bush of the African wilderness.
However, it was with Taita, the hero of his acclaimed Egyptian Series, that Wilbur most strongly identified, and River God remains one of his best-loved novels to this day.
Wilbur Smith’s very first novel When the Lion Feeds, published in 1964, was an instant bestseller and each of his subsequent novels has featured in the bestseller charts, often at number one, earning the author the opportunity to travel far and wide in search of inspiration and adventure.
According to a statement from Smith’s website, “He was a believer in deep research, meticulously corroborating every fact and adhering to the advice of his first publisher, Charles Pick at William Heinemann, to ‘write about the things you know well’. Smith, accomplished as a bushman, survivalist and big game hunter, gained a pilot’s licence, was an expert scuba diver, a conservator, managed his own game reserve and owned a tropical island in the Seychelles. He also used his vast experiences outside of Africa in places like Switzerland and rural Russia to assist with creating his fictional worlds. His own life, detailed in his autobiography, On Leopard Rock, was as stirring and incident packed as any of his novels.”
Smith was born on January 9th, 1933, in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia in Central Africa.
His father, Herbert Smith, was a sheet-metal worker and a strict disciplinarian and it was his more artistically inclined mother, Elfreda, who encouraged the young Wilbur to read the likes of CS Forester, Rider Haggard and John Buchan.
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