Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years

About Sue Townsend

Sue Townsend is the creator of Britain's best loved and bestselling diarist, Adrian Mole. She was born in Leicester in 1946, is married and has four children and five grandchildren and still lives in Leicester. She left school at fifteen and was employed in series of unskilled jobs. By her 18th birthday she was married, and a year later had her first baby. In 1978 she joined a Writers Group at the Phoenix Art Centre in Leicester and her career as an author and playwright took off from there. Her first play, Womberang, won its author a Thames Television Bursary as Writer in Residence.
 

Her book The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 1/2 and its sequel, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole were both number one bestsellers and made Sue Townsend the bestselling novelist of the 1980s. In 1991 came a third volume: Adrian Mole from Minor to Major, in 1993 Adrian Mole - The Wilderness Years and in 1999 Adrian Mole: the Cappuccino Years. Together the Mole diaries have sold over 8 million copies, have been adapted for radio, television, theatre and been translated into 34 languages. Her other novels include Rebuilding Coventry (1988), The Queen and I (1992) and Ghost Children (1998). A collection of her monthly columns for Sainsbury's Magazine was published in 2001 entitled Public Confessions of a Middle-aged Woman Aged 55 3/4.

Sue Townsend died in April 2014.