Wilbur Smith, author of Desert God, which topped the Sunday Times bestseller list for November again, was interviewed on RSG about his writing career recently.

Smith has been writing for 50 years, and has become a household name in South Africa and abroad. He says he hopes to work for another 50 years.

Smith says he always wanted to be a writer, but his father told him he would starve if he didn’t get a real job. So, he became an accountant who wrote to entertain himself in the evenings. He didn’t expect his first book, The Gods First Make Mad, to be accepted for publication – on his website he calls it “an atrocious title for a worse book”. But he has come a long way since then.

Listen to the podcast (The interview starts at 27:28. There is an Afrikaans introduction and brief Afrikaans explanations, but the interview is conducted in English.):

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Book details

• Witwatersrand by Wilbur Smith
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9780795707025
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• Desert God by Wilbur Smith
  EAN: 9780007535651
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