Sue Townsend, author of the Adrian Mole book series, dies aged 68

SUE Townsend, the English author who delighted the world with her Adrian Mole books, has died in England.

Dead at 68 ... author / writer Sue Townsend

SUE Townsend, the English author who delighted the world with her Adrian Mole books, has died in England aged 68.

Townsend suffered a stroke, after several years of ill-health brought on by diabetes which had caused her to lose her sight.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole

Townsend came to prominence in 1982 with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged Thirteen and Three Quarters, which detailed the inner thoughts of an anguished young man growing up as his parents’ marriage collapsed.

Fancying himself a poet and an intellectual, Mole struck a chord with readers worldwide with his eternal obsessions about his on-off again girlfriend Pandora, his spots, the state of the world, and - who could forget - the size of his “thing”.

The book captured the mood of Britain at the time, including the celebrations of the royal wedding of Charles and Diana, and the social upheaval wrought by Margaret Thatcher’s government.

Seven more volumes followed including The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984) and in his adulthood, Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (1999) and Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009).

Townsend also wrote a number of stage and radio plays.

Her 1992 novel The Queen and I was a comic imagining of the Royal Family struggling to get by after the United Kingdom declared itself a republic.

She is survived by her husband and four children.