South African novelist Wilbur Smith is dead

The writer has turned off on Saturday “unexpectedly”, announced his publisher. It was 88 years old.

Le Monde with AFP

The South African writer Wilbur Smith, author of many adventure novels translated around the world, died on Saturday, November 13 at Cape Town, in South Africa, at the age of 88, announced his publisher .

“The author of World-Salers Wilbur Smith died unexpectedly this afternoon in his Cape House, after a morning reading and writing, with his Niso wife at his side,” says A statement published on the Wilbur Smith Books

Wilbur Smith was the author of 49 novels translated in thirty languages, and who sold a total of 140 million copies, according to the publisher.

Famous from his first novel

Born January 9, 1933 in Northern Rhodesia, the current Zambia, from British parents, Wilbur Smith had known the celebrity since his first novel, when the lion is hungry, published in 1964.

His greatest success has been the monumental Saga des Courtney, a sequence of thirteen novels telling the destiny of a family over more than three centuries, since the beginning of the colonization of Africa by the Europeans to the apartheid in South Africa.

Wilbur Smith “Transported his readers to gold mines in South Africa, among the Pirates in the Indian Ocean, to Treasures buried in tropical islands, in conflicts in Arabia and Khartoum, the Ancient Egypt, in Germany of the Second World War, Paris, India, the Americas and Antarctica. He has made them meet ruthless diamond and slave merchants, and big game hunters in the jungles And the bush “, writes the publisher in the press release.

The publisher thanked the “Millions of Smith fans around the world who darled his incredible writing”.

/Media reports.