Tom Sharpe

Thomas Ridley Sharpe was an English satirical novelist, best known for his Wilt series, as well as Porterhouse Blue and Blott on the Landscape, all three of which were adapted for television.

Sharpe was born in Holloway, London, and brought up in Croydon. Sharpe's father, the Reverend George Coverdale Sharpe, was a Unitarian minister who was active in far-right politics in the 1930s. He was chairman of the Acton and Ealing branch of The Link, and a member of the Nordic League. He declared that he hated Jews "in the sense that he hated all corruption." Sharpe initially shared some of his father's views, but was horrified on seeing films of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Sharpe was educated at Bloxham School, on which he based Groxbourne in Vintage Stuff, followed by Lancing College. He then did National Service in the Royal Marines before being admitted to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read history and social anthropology.

Sharpe moved to South Africa in 1951, where he worked as a social worker and a teacher. He was friendly with the activist and artist Harold Strachan until they fell out over a woman. Sharpe's time in South Africa inspired his novels Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, in which he mocked the apartheid regime. He also wrote a play, The South African, which was critical of the regime. After it was performed in London, Sharpe was arrested for sedition in 1961 and deported from South Africa.

After returning to England, Sharpe took a position as a history lecturer at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, later Anglia Ruskin University. This experience inspired his Wilt series in which he derides popular English culture. From 1995 onward he and his American wife, Nancy, divided their time between Cambridge and their home in Llafranc, Spain, where he wrote Wilt in Nowhere. The couple had three daughters. Despite living in Catalonia, he did not learn either Spanish or Catalan. "I don't want to learn the language," he said, "I don't want to hear what the price of meat is."

Sharpe died on 6 June 2013 in Llafranc from complications of diabetes at the age of 85. He was reported to have been working on an autobiography. It was also said that he had suffered a stroke a few weeks earlier. Paying tribute, the author Robert McCrum wrote "The Tom Sharpe I knew was generous, acerbic, engaging, and full of wicked fun." Susan Sandon, Sharpe's editor at Random House, remarked that he was "witty, often outrageous, always acutely funny about the absurdities of life." His ashes were interred in the graveyard at the remote church in Thockrington, Northumberland, where his father had been a preacher.