Sue Townsend

Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946 and left school at fifteen. She married at eighteen and by twenty-three was a single parent with three children. She worked in a variety of jobs, including as a factory worker, shop assistant, and as a youth worker at adventure playgrounds. She wrote in secret for twenty years, eventually joining a writer’s group at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, in her thirties.

At the age of thirty-five, she won the Thames Television Playwright Award for her first play, Womberang. Other plays followed, including The Great Celestial Cow (1984), Ten Tiny Fingers, Nine Tiny Toes (1990) and You, Me and Wii (2010), but she is most well-known for her series of books about Adrian Mole, which she originally began writing in 1975.

The first of these, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾, was published in 1982 and was followed by The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984). These two books made her the bestselling novelist of the 1980s. They were followed by several more in the same series: True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (1989), Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993); The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole 1999-2001 (2008); Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004); and finally Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009). The books have been adapted for radio, television and theatre, the first being broadcast on radio in 1982. Sue also wrote the screenplays for television adaptations of the first and second books, and Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (published 1999, BBC television adaptation 2001).

Several of her books have been adapted for the stage, including The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾: the Play (1985) and The Queen and I: a Play with Songs (1994), which was performed by the Out of Joint Touring Company at the Vaudeville Theatre and toured Australia. The latter is based on another of her books, in which the Royal Family become deposed and take up residence on a council estate in Leicester. Her other books are Rebuilding Coventry (1998), Ghost Children (1997), Number Ten (2002), Queen Camilla (2006) and her final novel, The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (2012).

Sue was an Honorary MA at Leicester University, and in 2008 she was made a Distinguished Honorary Fellow, the highest award the University can give. She was an Honorary Doctor of Letters at Loughborough University, and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her other awards included the James Joyce Award of the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin, and the Frink Award at the Women of the Year Awards. In 2009 she was given the Honorary Freedom of Leicester. In honour of Sue, Leicester’s Phoenix Theatre was renamed the Sue Townsend Theatre in 2015.

Sue passed away in 2014 at the age of sixty-eight. She is widely regarded as Britain’s favourite comic writer.