Successful Novelist Sue Townsend died

Novelist Sue Townsend on 11 April 2014 died after a short illness. She was 68.

Susan Lillian known as Sue Townsend was an English novelist and playwright best known as the author of the Adrian Mole books.

The first of her comic series The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole was published in 1982 and the eighth installment Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years was released in 2009. The books were right on top of the highest selling charts in UK in the 1980s.

Sue was born in Leicester in 1946 and left school at 15 years of age. She wrote in secret for 20 years, eventually joining a writers' group at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester in her thirties.

She won the Thames Television Playwright Award and started her writing career. Her other best-selling novels included The Queen and I.

Other plays followed including The Great Celestial Cow (1984), Ten Tiny Fingers, Nine Tiny Toes (1990), and most recently You, me and Wii (2010), but she became known for her series of books about Adrian Mole, which she originally began writing in 1975.