Portrait of Frederick Selous

Frederick Selous

British explorer, officer, hunter, and conservationist

Lived
1851–1917

Updated September 2026

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About Frederick Selous

Frederick Courteney Selous, DSO was a British explorer, army officer, professional hunter, and conservationist, famous for his exploits in Southeast Africa. His real-life adventures inspired Sir Henry Rider Haggard to create the fictional character Allan Quatermain. Selous was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Cecil Rhodes and Frederick Russell Burnham. He was pre-eminent within a group of big game hunters that included Abel Chapman and Arthur Henry Neumann. He was the older brother of the ornithologist and writer Edmund Selous.

Biography from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Authors like Frederick Selous

Sources: book lists and dates from Wikidata and Open Library, ratings from Open Library readers, free texts from Project Gutenberg. Last updated September 2026.