Satirical novelist Tom Sharpe dies aged 85

The acclaimed author Tom Sharpe, who wrote the novels Porterhouse Blue, Blott On The Landscape and the Wilt series of comedies, has died at his home in Llafranc in Spain at the age of 85.

Born in London in 1928 and educated at Lancing and Cambridge, Sharpe spent time in the Royal Marines before moving to South Africa in 1951 where worked as a social worker, teacher and photographer. He was a strong critic of the country's apartheid regime and wrote a number of political plays and, later, novels inspired by what he saw. He was deported to Britain in 1961.

Sharpe had his first novel, Riotous Assemly, published in 1971. Altogether he wrote 16 novels combining comedy, farce and satire.

Blott On The Landscape, about the construction of a road through a fictional rural gorge and Porterhouse Blue, a satire on Cambridge University life, were both adapted for television.

The last of his five-part 'Wilt' series of comedies, The Wilt Inheritance, was published in 2010. In the books, Henry Wilt is a harrassed and jaded assistant lecturer at an English community college whose fantasies of revenge against his wife, lead him stumbling into a farcical journey of unfortunate mishaps and bizarre adventures.

In the 1990s, Sharpe and his wife began dividing their time between Spain and Cambridge.

He died on Thursday 6 June. Sharpe and his wife Nancy had three children.