Order of Wilbur Smith Books

There are authors who write about adventure—and then there are authors who live it. Wilbur Smith, the literary titan of high-stakes sagas and sweeping African landscapes, didn’t just tell stories. He unleashed them, like a lion shaking the savannah. Born on January 9, 1933, in Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia (now Kabwe, Zambia), Wilbur Addison Smith grew up in the heart of Africa. That geographical heartbeat—of tribal kingdoms, colonial chaos, and wilderness that roared with danger and beauty—etched itself into his DNA and, eventually, into nearly every page he wrote.

Smith was the son of a strict yet adventurous British father and a fiercely book-loving mother. His childhood was divided between dodging elephants on safaris and devouring novels by Rider Haggard and Hemingway. Though his father dismissed writing as a frivolous pursuit, Wilbur's mother quietly fueled his literary dreams. As irony would have it, the very profession his father mocked made his son a global sensation—and a multimillionaire.

Education-wise, Smith initially took a more "respectable" route. He attended Michaelhouse, an elite boarding school in Natal, South Africa, before earning a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. His first career was as a tax accountant. Yes—Wilbur Smith, master of epic battles and sun-scorched quests, once shuffled through paperwork in a fluorescent-lit office. That, too, didn’t last.

The real turning point came in 1964 when he published his debut novel, When the Lion Feeds. Fueled by rejection slips and a heap of doubt, this story introduced readers to Sean Courtney and an Africa as ferocious and mesmerizing as Smith’s own childhood. The novel exploded onto the literary scene, not just as a book but as a bold statement: Wilbur Smith had arrived, and he wasn’t leaving quietly.

Over the next five decades, Wilbur Smith would become synonymous with action-packed historical fiction. He published over 49 novels, many of them multi-generational series like the Courtney, Ballantyne, and Ancient Egypt sagas. His works have been translated into more than 30 languages, selling over 140 million copies worldwide. Whether readers were tracking ivory hunters across colonial landscapes or unlocking secrets buried beneath the Nile, Smith made them feel there—sunburnt, heart-pounding, and breathless.

Yet his life wasn’t without drama worthy of a novel itself. Wilbur married four times, and his personal relationships were often as turbulent as his prose. His fourth wife, Mokhiniso Rakhimova, became a key figure in his later life and estate. Controversies occasionally followed his legacy—accusations of formulaic storytelling and exaggerated masculinity—but Smith never claimed to write literary fiction. He wrote escapes, and the world happily followed.

Smith passed away peacefully at his home in Cape Town on November 13, 2021, at the age of 88. But the adventure didn’t die with him. Before his passing, he partnered with co-authors to continue his prolific universe—ensuring that long after his last breath, his characters would keep riding, fighting, and discovering.

In a world increasingly digitized and disconnected, Wilbur Smith reminded readers of raw adventure—of the taste of dust on your tongue, the tension before a tribal ambush, and the price of ambition in untamed lands. His stories weren’t just fiction; they were a return to the primal.

And if you haven’t yet opened a Wilbur Smith novel? Well then, dear reader, your next great adventure awaits. Which hero will you follow first—the gold-hungry Courtneys, the war-scarred Ballantynes, or the pharaohs whose secrets whisper beneath the Egyptian sand?