South African best-selling author Wilbur Smith, who died on Saturday aged 88, was a master of the adventure novel, inspired by his own life, from a lion attack to his months in a mine gold to document a novel.
He was successful as early as 1964 with the publication of his first novel When the lion is hungry, the story of a young man who grows up on a cattle farm in South Africa.
He will then develop the Courtney family saga 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 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.
“The world’s greatest storyteller has passed away,” South African detective story writer Deon Meyer wrote on Twitter.
Meticulous research
Wilbur Smith was known for his meticulous historical research and his books inspired by his own travels.
For his novel Of 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.
He credits his mother for teaching him a love of nature and reading, while his father gave him a gun at the age of eight, which he said marked his love affair with the guns and hunting.
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 bit crazy to try and make a living writing,” he said.
Politically incorrect
the Daily 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 autobiography, On Leopard Rock, recounts 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.
Lover of scuba diving, he owned a tropical island in the Seychelles. He also managed his own game reserve.
In 1997, he wrote a controversial article for a safari magazine, in which he defended elephant hunting and the controlled sale of ivory, as a means of saving African wildlife.
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.