McCall Smith, Alexander

The British author Alexander McCall Smith – called Sandy by family and friends – was born in Bulawayo in the then British colony of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) as the youngest of four children to a British public prosecutor and his wife. He was schooled at the Christian Brothers College in Bulawayo before travelling to Scotland in 1966 to start studying Law at the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1971. He subsequently worked as a teacher and in 1973 gained employment at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.