Bestselling novelist whose savagely satirical black comedies attacked the injustice of apartheid and the absurdities of academic life
Tom Sharpe was first in the news in 1961 when a notice appeared in The Times stating that a Mr T. R. Sharpe was being deported from South Africa. The item disclosed that he was a teacher in Pietermaritzburg and had written an anti-apartheid play. Ten years later there appeared in The Guardian a feature devoted to his first novel, Riotous Assembly. It was set in South Africa. Over the next 13 years Sharpe became a publishing phenomenon, producing 11 immensely popular novels on contemporary themes and mapping out what one critic called “Tom Sharpe territory”.
For a popular novelist