Tom Sharpe, whose savage pen and biting turns of phrase helped to earn him the title of the master of British farce, has died on Thursday following complications related to diabetes, according to Spanish reports.
Sharpe's editor at Random House, Susan Sandon, paid tribute to a man who was "warm, supportive and wholly engaging".
"Tom Sharpe was one of our greatest satirists and a brilliant writer," she said. "Witty, often outrageous, always acutely funny about the absurdities of life."
Sharpe, author of 16 novels, made his debut in 1971 with the brutally comic Riotous Assembly. Set in South Africa, the novel describes the chaos that ensues after an innocent black man is blown apart by an elephant gun. Sharpe had lived in South Africa following national service in the Royal Marines, doing social work before teaching in Natal.
Born in 1928 and educated at Lancing College and Pembroke College, Cambridge, Sharpe later worked as a lecturer in history at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology.
A satirical take on life
His third novel, Porterhouse Blue, was published in 1974. A satirical take on life in a fictional Cambridge college, it went on to find further success in the 1980s with a television adaptation starring David Jason.
Sharpe went on to write the Wilt series of novels, about the long-suffering lecturer Henry Wilt – seen as his alter ego – "an insignificant little man to whom things happened and for whom life was a chapter of indignities".
Reviewing the fourth Wilt novel, Wilt in Nowhere, Will Hammond in the Observer said Sharpe gave "voice to a deep-rooted part of English culture", and "confirms once again that his position at the heart of British comedy is as assured as that of the seaside postcard".
"Over the course of his prolific career, Sharpe has been hailed as the king of slapstick, a satirist in the line of Wodehouse, and a major craftsman in the art of farce [a spoonerism he would no doubt enjoy]. In Wilt in Nowhere, he shows himself to be all these and more: vengeful, chaotic, Swiftian in his tastes, cartoonish in his extremes, and above all wild and amusing," wrote Hammond.
Sharpe's most recent novel, The Wilt Inheritance, was published in 2010. – © Guardian News and Media 2013