JOHANNESBURG: Wilbur Smith’s internationally recognized writer died at his home in South Africa on Saturday after a career for decades in writing, his office said.
He is 88 years old.
With 49 titles under his belt, Smith became the name of the household, his swashbuckling adventure stories brought readers from tropical islands to African forests and even ancient Egypt and World War II.
“Wilbur Smith’s best-selling writer detached this afternoon at the Cape Town house after morning reading and writing with his wife Niso on his side,” said a statement released on the Wilbur Smith Books website and also by the UK Books Books Publisher.
“Master of undisputed and undeniable adventure writing, Novel Wilbur Smith has gripped readers for more than half a century, selling more than 140 million copies worldwide in more than thirty languages.” The statement did not reveal the cause of death.
His debut novel in 1964 “when the lion feeded”, the story of a young man who grew on the South African cattle farm, became an instant displaced book and caused 15 sequels, tracing the fate of the ambitious family for more than 200 years.
Born in Zambia in 1933 with a British family, he was also a big game hunter, after adulthood experiencing a forest, hill and Sabana Africa on his parents farm.
He also holds the pilot license and is a scuba diver.
As a conservationist, he manages the backup of his own game and has a tropical island in Seychelles.
He praised his mother by teaching him to love nature and read, while his father – a strict scientific discipline – giving him a gun at the age of eight years, what he took was the affair of love for life with firearms and hunting.
He signed a cerebral malaria when he was only one and a half years – a disease that was so serious there was a concern he would break the brain if he survived.
“It might help me because I think you have to be a little crazy to try to make a living from writing,” he then pondered.
The bestselling “Courtney Series” is the longest run in publishing history, unfurling generations and three centuries, “through a critical period from the beginning of Colonial Africa to the American Civil War, and to the Apartheid era in South Africa”, said the publisher.
But with Taita, her “hero” Egyptian series “, that Wilbur” was mostly identified, and the god of the river remains one of his most loved novels to this day “, he added.
He also used his extensive experience outside of Africa in places such as Swiss and Russian rural to help create the world of fiction.
In his 2018 memoir “at Leopard Rock”, Smith tells of having “difficult times, bad marriages …
burning midnight oil does not go into anywhere, but has, all in the end, adds extraordinary life and beautiful.” I want to be remembered as someone who gives pleasure to millions of people, “he wrote.
His office thanks” Millions of fans around the world who appreciated his extraordinary writing and joining us all on his amazing adventure ” .
Language and some were made into films, including “shouting at the devil” with Lee Marvin and Roger Moore in 1976.
Smith “go behind the treasure novel,” including books co-author of an unpublished, according to Kate Parkin, management.
Director at Bonnier Books.
Kevin Conroy Scott, a literary agent for the past decade, describes it as “icon, greater than life” and said “his knowledge of Africa, and his imagination did not know the limitations”.
He married four times, with his last wife, Mokhiniso Rakhimova from Tajikistan, Junior 39 years.