Sue Townsend: The secret writer who became a best-selling author

Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946.

A postman's daughter, started writing secretly at the age of 14.

Sue left school with no qualifications at 15, was married by 18 and had three children by the time she was 22.

Sue continued writing after she had put the children to bed, and when she became a single mother at the age of 23, after the divorce from her first husband.

However, she never considered doing anything about her writing until she married her second husband, Colin Broadway, the father of her fourth child.

Sue had a variety of jobs, including factory worker, shop assistant, and youth worker at adventure playgrounds.

In her 30s, she joined a local writers' group at Leicester's old Phoenix Theatre, and in 1979, Womberang, the first of her many plays, was produced.

At the age of 35, she won the Thames Television Playwright Award for Womberang, and started her writing career.

Other plays followed including The Great Celestial Cow (1984), Ten Tiny Fingers, Nine Tiny Toes (1990), and most recently You, me and Wii (2010), but she became most famous for her series of books about Adrian Mole, which she originally began writing in 1975.

The first of these, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾ was published in 1982 and was followed by The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole in 1984. These two books made her the best-selling novelist of the 1980s.

They were followed by several more in the same series including Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993); Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004); and most recently Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009) - misspelling intended.

The series that secured Sue's reputation as one of the country's most talented humorous writers - and made her a millionaire.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide and has become a modern classic.

Several of her books have been adapted for the stage, including The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾: The Play (1985) and The Queen and I: a Play with Songs (1994), which was performed by the Out of Joint Touring Company at the Vaudeville Theatre and toured Australia. The latter is based on another of her books, in which the Royal Family become deposed and take up residence on a council estate in Leicester. Other books include Rebuilding Coventry (1988), Ghost Children (1997) and Queen Camilla (2006).

Sue was made an honorary Master of Arts by the University of Leicester, and in 2008 she was made a Distinguished Honorary Fellow, the highest award the University can give. She was an Honorary Doctor of Letters at Loughborough University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her other awards include the James Joyce Award of the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin, and the Frink Award at the Women of the Year Awards. In 2009 she was given the Honorary Freedom of Leicester.

Sue's most recent novel, The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year, was published in 2012 by Michael Joseph, selling more than half a million copies to date in the UK alone.

Sue leaves husband Colin, children Sean, Danny, Victoria and Susan and 10 grandchildren.