In the gallery of bestsellers by Italian and non-Italian authors, this time we focus on a South African writer beloved by Italian readers who generously reward each of his new novels. There is little doubt that Wilbur smith is today one of the most loved writers in the world, and even less on the fact that Italian readers contribute to his fame in a very remarkable way. At the moment about forty works are owed to him, and it can reasonably be assumed that the number will grow significantly, given that, despite his 86 years, he enjoys excellent health and has no intention of putting down his pen. Furthermore, to make his determination even more effective, in recent times he has joined collaborators who allow him to complete many other novels.
A global success
His works are translated into all the main languages of the planet, and in most of the secondary ones. And among these, it was said, those in our language enjoy very high sales.
And the numbers, as always, are there to prove it. At the moment he is credited with 130 million copies sold worldwide, and the number is definitely lacking, as it grows day by day.
In Italy it exceeded 27 million, a circulation that we do not know which other writers can boast in our country. Well that goes, however, to be counted on the fingers of one hand. Then divided into the novels translated into Italian, they make each one a best seller with very high sales, for some well over a million copies. Tell us who can be accredited in Italy, among foreign authors, with such a palmares.
Italy's contribution to its success
A good fifth of the copies sold worldwide is therefore due to the Italian versions: a very high percentage, which is not reflected in any other case. Just to make a comparison with another narrator extraordinarily loved in Italy, Georges Simenon, Maigret's father, we can see that the copies he sold in our country are around 25 million, a figure similar to, albeit slightly lower than that of Wilbur Smith.
But Simenon has exceeded 700 million copies sold worldwide, five times those of Smith. So Italy contributes 3-4 percent of his total sales to Simenon's sales, while for Smith we are over 20 percent: a very high following of Italian readers like for no other narrator!
Adventure books
Its narrative scenario is not that of the dominant sectors of pink or yellow, then conjugated in the various internal articulations, but that of adventure. The same one that made Emilio Salgari great in his time. Not that Wilbur Smith can be considered an epigone of him, there are numerous differences between the two, but if we were forced to associate him with some author of our literary tradition, we wouldn't know who, better than Sandokan's father.
Like him, Smith groups his stories into cycles, among which the predominant one is undoubtedly that of the Courtneys, which absorbs almost half of his production, which began with his first work, The Fate of the Lion. This is followed, to the very small extent of a few cycle titles, by that of the Ballantynes, that of the ancient Egyptians and that of Hector Cross. Finally, other autonomous novels conclude his literary production.
The land of Africa, its privileged setting
His fiction focuses mostly on the history of Africa, from the sixteenth century onwards. The traditions, the figures, the mentality, the culture, the lifestyles, the environments of the continent that saw him born and forged, in a word the rough and fascinating southern Africa, are the main dish of his production.
Later Smith expanded to other circles, and crossed the world of ancient Egypt, centered on the well-constructed figure of Taita, the eunuch servant, scribe and practically ruler of the country of the Nile, in which the writer pours many characters of the his personality. Or that of Europe in the 900s, with his infinite dramas, always described in a very attractive way for the public. But there is no doubt that his starting point remains that linked to the African world.
The life
And it is there, in fact, that Wilbur Smith was born in 1933, in particular in the former Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, into a white family of farmers and landowners. He spends his childhood on his father's farm, in the open air, in the middle of nature, between fields and plantations, between forest and savannah, populated by the fabulous animals that we all know and love: lions, elephants, giraffes, zebras, crocodiles, leopards and so saying. And there he lived in the company of friends, both blacks, sons of those who worked for his father, and whites from neighbors' families.
He completed his high school and then university studies in South Africa, he graduated in commercial sciences, but from an early age he showed a great passion for reading, spurred on by his mother and then by a college teacher. For the father, on the other hand, the rude owner of the immense farm of 12.000 hectares, cut one could say with a knife, the time dedicated to reading is all wasted time, taken away from far more important occupations.
After completing his studies Wilbur is employed in a tax company, without however renouncing his passion for reading, which leads him, with the passage of time, to the parallel one for writing. The first things, however, as often happens to beginners, receive a series of refusals from the publishers to whom they are proposed. All stuff to throw away. At the moment his literary performances are a total failure.
A very busy married life
In the meantime, he marries and has two children, but the marriage quickly falls apart, and at 24 he is already divorced. The same scenario is repeated with the second wife. With both they will not be missing in the future, once he has achieved success and ascertained the extraordinary breadth of his royalties, diatribes and legal clashes. But at the moment we are at zero and to earn a living he has to work in the hated tax agency.
The success
The passion for writing leads him to make another attempt, also encouraged by some stories that are finally beginning to be appreciated. He abandons the intentions of narrating things bigger than him, as he had done until then, and focuses on the world he really knows deeply: that of his land, with its spectacular nature, wild animals, characters with a strong character. And then there's hunting, fishing, battles, dreams come true and those that remain, success and failure, the hard struggle for life and for wealth: the elements, in essence, which characterize the life of all, but that in southern Africa they do it even more.
The London publisher to whom his literary agent sends the novel immediately grasps the potential of the book, sees a sure talent in the young man and in 1964 brings out the publication of The Lion's Fate. The book immediately achieved an extraordinary success with the public and was to become one of his greatest, if not his main, best seller.
At this point Wilbur Smith abandons the drab job of accountant at the tax agency and dedicates himself to his passion. He begins to publish, year after year, the series of novels, almost one title a year.
The situation in Italy
In Italy Wilbur Smith was engaged in the early 1946s, about fifteen years after his debut, by the publisher Longanesi, an imprint born in XNUMX, once prestigious and with a respectable catalogue, but at the time in a comatose state, practically in agony.
The publishing house was taken over in 1977 by Luciano Mauri, patron of the Messaggerie, who two years later entrusted its management to Mario Spagnol, former manager of Bompiani, Feltrinelli and Mondadori. On the subject, the two need no introduction, they know the "profession" of publisher like few others and relaunch the tarnished Longanesi logo in a big way. They do so by focusing on foreign fiction and the South African author is the first they bet on, followed by Michel Ende, Clive Cussler, Isaac Singer and others.
The gamble paid off big time and contributed greatly to the relaunch of the Milanese publishing house.
The excellent level of his prose
Alongside the bare and cold numbers of his fortune, however, there is another element to take into consideration when talking about Wilbur Smith, namely the artistic value of his prose, because it must be recognized that the great popular diffusion does not come at the expense of the quality of his novels. He is capable of keeping the reader captivated in an ongoing and sometimes spasmodic manner, the first characteristic, and we could add unique, of a best seller, but he does it with a valuable type of writing.
It won't be a Nobel prize winner, but in any case we don't set limits to providence here either, given that some perplexity among those who received it is more than legitimate, but surely yours is valuable prose, not flatly commercial.
In short, Wilbur Smith manages to maintain that combination of artistic quality and popular diffusion, which we would always like to find in novels, and which very few writers from the twentieth century onwards, but the discourse repeats itself in exactly the same terms also for the previous century, can guarantee.
Collaboration with other authors
In recent times, given his firm determination to continue with the narrative, however to be reconciled with the inexorable passage of time, Smith has taken to making use of the collaboration of younger authors. He practices this more widespread than is believed in certain writers, who have become real trademarks over time. To them he entrusts the completion or characterization of his stories. In the meantime, other ghost writers are adapting his novels to a younger audience, roughly from 12 to 18, eliminating scenes that are too violent or too immoral and increasing those that reveal positive and heroic values.
Much of the credit goes to the new publisher Harper Collins, who replaced the traditional English one, and to a large extent also to the fourth and last wife, whom he met and married in the year 30, the year after the death of his beloved third wife from a brain tumor , with whom he had lived for 39 years. The new partner, a Tajik XNUMX years his junior, is proving to be very skilled in managing the private life but also the editorial life of the writer, and she tries to make the most of her husband's remaining opportunities.
In this way his name continues to attract masses of readers, as can be seen from the success that smiles at his latest works, such as War Cry, set in his native Africa from the early twentieth century to the rise of Nazi Germany, or The Courtneys' War which describes the events of World War II, including the tragedy of the shoà, or The last pharaoh, the last episode of the saga of ancient Egypt, or finally King of kings, the last one released, in which the events of the Courtneys and the Ballantynes intertwined at the end of the nineteenth century.
All this while waiting for new titles to come out to keep Wilbur Smith's name aloft for a long time to come.
