Wilbur Smith, prolific author of fiction set in Africa, died on Saturday in Cape Town.
Born in Broken Hill in the-then Northern Rhodesia in January 1933, and subsequently educated in South Africa, his career saw some 49 novels published.
His first novel, When the Lion Feeds, centuries around the character of Sean Courtney, and is set against the background of colonial Natal, the Zulu War and the later Gold Rush. The main character was conceived in part as a tribute to Smith’s grandfather.
The Courtney family – in various iterations from the 1600s to the 1980s – was featured in an extensive series of novels, that last of which was published in 2019.
A shorter series followed the fictional Ballantyne family in the then-Rhodesia. He also produced a series set in Ancient Egypt.
In a 2018 memoir, he wrote: ‘I want to be remembered as somebody who gave pleasure to millions.’
Smith lived a tempestuous private life, having been married four times, and having had difficult relationships with his children.
Image: Vesi libra, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons