Īs a baby, Smith was sick with cerebral malaria for ten days but made a full recovery.
I don't think he ever read a book in his life, including mine". He was a boxer, a hunter, very much a man's man. "He was used to working with his hands and had massively developed arms from cutting metal. 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. He was named after aviator Wilbur Wright. 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 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.īy 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).
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. Wilbur Addison Smith (9 January 1933 – 13 November 2021) was a Northern Rhodesian-born British-South African novelist specialising in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries.Īn accountant by training, he gained a film contract with his first published novel When the Lion Feeds.
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