Wilbur Smith detail of the local hunting and mining way of life, along with the romance and conflict that goes with it. As of 2014 his 35 published novels had sold more than 120 million copies, 24 million of them in Italy. Smith was born in Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia (now Kabwe, Zambia). His father was a metal worker who opened a sheet metal factory and then bought a cattle ranch. "My father was a tough man", said Smith. "He was used to working with his hands and had massively developed arms from cutting metal. He was a boxer, a hunter, very
Wilbur Smith set in contemporary South Africa, based on a real-life flooding of a gold mine near Johannesburg in 1968. "The Diamond Hunters" (1971) was set in contemporary West Africa, later filmed as "The Kingfisher Caper" (1975). Around this time, Smith also wrote an original screenplay, "The Last Lion" (1971) which was filmed in South Africa with Jack Hawkins; it was not a success. Smith admits to being tempted by movie money at this stage of his career but deliberately wrote something that was a complete change of pace, "The Sunbird" (1972). It was a very important book for me in my