Wilbur Addison Smith (9 January 1933 – 13 November 2021) was a Northern Rhodesian-born British-South African novelist specializing in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries.

An accountant by training, he gained a film contract with his first published novel, When the Lion Feeds, which encouraged him to become a full-time writer. After this, he developed three long chronicles of the South African experience, which became best-sellers. He acknowledged his publisher Charles Pick's advice to "write about what you know best", and his work incorporates much authentic detail of the local hunting and mining way of life, along with the romance and conflict that accompanies it.

By the time of his death in 2021, he had published 49 books and sold over 140 million copies, 24 million of them in Italy (by 2014).

His books have been translated into twenty-six languages and have sold over 120 million copies. Smith was born to a British family in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, in Central Africa, and attended Rhodes University in South Africa.

Wilbur Smith died at his Cape Town home on November 13, 2021. He was 88 years old at the time.