Sue Townsend obituary

Comic writer who created the diaries of Adrian Mole

Sue Townsend, who has died aged 68 after suffering from a stroke, was one of Britains most celebrated comic writers: novelist, playwright and journalist. She was best known for the fictional diaries of Adrian Mole, a character who, unlike Peter Pan, is allowed to grow up, evolving from the penis-measuring adolescent who confides I was racked with sexuality but it wore off when I helped my father put manure on our rose bed in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ (1982) to the middle-aged and, Townsend liked to insist, more evolved and better-dressed bloke who survives prostate cancer in Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009).

The glory of Mole is his inability to see the funny side, his self-importance and the way in which his diaries unwittingly accommodate his creators social commentary. The first book, which in the 80s made Townsend the decades bestselling novelist, took a shrewd look at Margaret Thatchers Britain. In Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (1999) she took on New Labour with equivalent relish. Mole was a hapless Blairite, in love with Pandora Braithwaite, on-message MP. By the time of his last sighting he was living with his dissatisfied wife, Daisy, in a converted pigsty.