British satirical author Tom Sharpe, known for his Wilt novel series, has died aged 85, publisher Random House said this morning.
The London-born author’s Wilt series included six books of which the last, The Wilt Inheritance, was published in 2010.
Sharpe's 1975 novel Blott on the Landscape was adapted into a six-part BBC television series in 1985 starring David Suchet as Blott.
The writer had major success with 16 books, although there were some lengthy gaps between them due to health problems.
He had been living in northern Spain for two decades, partly because he preferred the healthcare system there.
Spanish newspaper El Pais said today that he had died at his home in Llafranc in Catalonia due to complications from diabetes.
Sharpe won huge acclaim for his writing, with The Times calling him “the funniest novelist writing today”, although he did not publish his first, Riotous Assembly, until he was 43 in 1971.
Within a few years he had published his best known works - Porterhouse Blue, Wilt, and Blott On The Landscape.
Despite moving from Cambridge to Spain in the early 1990s, he had little interest in learning Spanish and kept a circle of English-speaking friends.
“I don’t want to learn the language. I don’t want to hear what the price of meat is,” he said in an interview with an ex-patriate journal. And he spoke of how he was disenchanted with the UK: “It is so depressing. I can’t bear it. There is no such thing as the English gentleman any more. Money rules everything.”
After studying at Lancing College and Pembroke College, Cambridge, he served in the Marines before moving to South Africa in his early 20s, working as a social worker and teacher. He also had his own photographic studio.
However, after 10 years, in 1961, he was deported for criticising the apartheid regime and he returned to the UK to lecture at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology - a period which helped to inspire his character Wilt, who featured in five novels.
Susan Sandon, managing director of his publisher Cornerstone, said: “Tom Sharpe was one of our greatest satirists and a brilliant writer: witty, often outrageous, always acutely funny about the absurdities of life.
“The private Tom was warm, supportive and wholly engaging. I feel enormously privileged to have been his publisher.”
PA/Reuters