Wilbur A. Smith

Wilbur Addison Smith was a Rhodesian-born British novelist, born on January 9, 1933, in Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia, now Kabwe, Zambia, and died on November 13, 2021, in Cape Town, South Africa. The son of a cattle rancher and metalworker, he survived a serious bout of cerebral malaria as an infant and grew up on the family's central African farms before being educated at Michaelhouse boarding school in Natal and Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, where he earned a degree in commerce.

He worked as a tax accountant for the South African Revenue Service while drafting fiction in his evenings. After the rejection of his first novel, he succeeded with When the Lion Feeds, published by William Heinemann in 1964, which launched the Courtney family saga and was banned in apartheid-era South Africa over its depictions of interracial relationships. The Courtney series eventually ran to nineteen novels spanning the seventeenth century to the late twentieth.

His parallel Ballantyne series, beginning with A Falcon Flies in 1980, traced an English family across colonial southern Africa. The standalone Egyptian series, opening with River God in 1993, followed the eunuch slave Taita through the Hyksos invasion and pharaonic dynasties. Across his career Smith published more than fifty novels in some thirty languages, with combined sales reported above one hundred and forty million copies.

His memoir On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures appeared in 2018. He worked in his final years with co-authors including Tom Harper and David Churchill on extending his series.

The name Wilbur is an English given name derived from a medieval surname, traditionally connected to the Germanic elements willa, meaning "will" or "desire," and burh, meaning "fortress." He bore it as a writer whose narrative will fortified African historical fiction.