South African author of bestsellers Wilbur Smith, who died on Saturday at the age of 88, was a master of the adventure novel, inspired by his own life, from a lion attack to his months in a gold mine to document a novel.
He achieved success as early as 1964 with the publication of his first novel When the lion is hungry, the story of a young man growing up on a cattle farm in South Africa.
He then developed the saga of this Courtney family over many volumes, following them over more than three centuries, from colonial Africa to apartheid, making “the longest in the history of publishing” according to his editor.
The heart of his work is “the history of Africa”: “I wrote about blacks and whites. I wrote about hunting, gold mining, parties and women, ”said the best-selling author in his autobiography published on his official website.
His second great family saga, after that of the Courtneys, is that of the Ballantyne family, which begins with The Eye of the Hawk.
From the first Dutch settlers to apartheid and decolonization, he paints a history of South Africa and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), where he himself was born to British parents in 1933.
Meticulous research
Wilbur Smith was known for his meticulous historical research and his books inspired by his own travels.
For his novel Gold and ebony, he went so far as to work in a South African gold mine for several weeks.
“I was kind of a privileged member of the team, I could ask questions and not be told to shut up,” he told the Daily Telegraph about his experience.
In the early 1990s, he embarked on a historical fresco in Egypt with The River God, The Seventh Papyrus and The Sons of the Nile.
Some of his books have been adapted into films, including Man’s word with Lee Marvin and Roger Moore in 1976.
In fifty years of career, Wilbur Smith has been the author of 49 novels translated into thirty languages, which have sold a total of 140 million copies, according to his publisher.
As a child he had been a secret reader, spending hours in the bathroom secretly reading his favorite novels, his father finding his son’s obsession with books unhealthy.
A graduate of Rhodes University in South Africa, he aspired to become a journalist until his father urged him to “find a real job”.
He briefly became a chartered accountant, but devoted himself to writing from the success of When the lion is hungry.
He explains his vocation as a writer by the fact that he suffered from a severe form of malaria as a baby, with a high risk of brain damage if he survived.
“It probably helped me because I think you have to be a little crazy to try to make a living by writing,” he analyzed.
Politically incorrect
theDaily Mail wondered in 2017 about the success of Wilbur Smith, whose books are a “politically incorrect whirlwind of sex, violence, misogyny, big game hunters.”
Published in 2018, his autobiographyOn Leopard Rockrecounts his own adventures, the raw material for his fiction: how he was attacked by a lion, got lost in the African bush or had to crawl through gold mine tunnels.
Survivalist and hunter, he loved scuba diving and owned a tropical island in the Seychelles.
He has married four times, his last wife, Mokhiniso Rakhimova, from Tajikistan, being his junior at 39 years.
Smith lived most of the time in South Africa, but also in London.