Library Weekly

The ASCL's Library Weekly is our library’s weekly spotlight on African people and events. Inspired by the SciHiBlog, this service is based on information retrieved from Wikipedia and Wikidata and is completed with selected titles from the ASCL Library Catalogue.

N.B. The weeklies are not updated and reflect the state of information at a given point in time.

Library Weekly archive

Wilbur Smith

Wilbur Smith signing copy of "Assegai" - april 2009; London (Wikimedia Commons: Vesi libra, CC-BY-3.0) On 9 January 1933, British-South African novelist Wilbur Smith was born in Ndola in what is now Zambia. He specialised in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries. He also wrote a series of historical novels that are based in Ancient Egypt during Pharaoh Memnon's reign.

An accountant by training, he gained a film contract with his first published novel 'When the Lion Feeds'. 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. 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.

By the time of his death in 2021 he had published 49 books and had sold more than 140 million copies. Several of Smith's novels have also been turned into movies and TV shows.

(Source: Wikipedia)