Tom Sharpe was born in 1928 and educated at Lancing College and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He did his national service in the Marines before moving to South Africa in 1951, where he did social work before teaching in Natal. He had a photographic studio in Pietermaritzburg from 1957 until 1961, and from 1963 to 1972 he was a lecturer in History at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology.
He is the author of sixteen best selling novels, including Porterhouse Blue and Blott on the Landscape, which were serialised on television, and Wilt, which was made into a film.
Tom Sharpe died in June 2013 at his home in northern Spain.
Tom Sharpe as a
photographer
in South Africa
ca 1960
The Questors premiere of the Tom Sharpe play THE SOUTH AFRICAN caused something of a stir in South Africa.
A clipping from the Natal Daily News dated 4 May 1961 described it as, "a powerful three-act play with South Africa as its background and apartheid as its theme ... honest, sensitive and dramatic, and in its final curtain, almost unendurably poignant."
But another South African newspaper ran the following story:
