Laurens van der Post

Laurens van der Post was born in the Orange Free State in 1906, the thirteenth of fifteen children in an Afrikaner family with mixed Dutch, French Huguenot, and Scottish ancestry. He fought in the Second World War, was captured by the Japanese in 1942, and spent four years as a prisoner of war — experiences he wrote about in The Seed and the Sower (1963), which became the Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence film.

The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958) is his most celebrated travel book — an account of his search for the Bushmen (San) of the Kalahari, a people he believed preserved a wisdom about the relationship between humans and the natural world that industrialised civilisation had lost. The book is part documentary, part myth, and was enormously influential — it introduced millions of Western readers to the concept of indigenous ecological knowledge.

He wrote further Kalahari books — The Heart of the Hunter (1961), A Story Like the Wind (1972) — and served as a close advisor to Prince Charles, who acknowledged van der Post's influence on his thinking about the natural world.

His reputation suffered after his death when biographers revealed significant fabrications in his accounts — including that he never in fact found the Bushmen he described encountering, and that his "Bushman guide" did not exist. His legacy remains contested: his books opened important territory, but the experiences he described were largely invented.