Sue Townsend has been writing since she left school at the age of fifteen in 1961, but it was only when she joined a writers' group in 1978 at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester, where she was born and still lives today, that she finally gained recognition for her work. The first play she wrote there, Womberang, won its author a Thames Television Bursary as Writer in Residence and, at 35, launched her hugely successful writing career. Since then she has continued to write for the stage, with her plays including The Great Celestial Cow (1984), Ten Tiny Fingers, Nine Tiny Toes (1990), Are You Sitting Comfortably? and an adaptation of her book The Queen and I: a Play with Songs (1994) which was performed by the Out of Joint Touring Company around Australia.
It is for her series of books about Adrian Mole that Townsend is most well known however, the first of which The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 was published in 1982 followed by The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole in 1984. These two books made her the best-selling novelist of the 1980s and led Townsend to write the screenplays for their successful television adaptations. They have been followed by several more in the same series including Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993), and most recently, Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004). Three of the books have been serialised for Radio, a medium which Townsend has explored further through her production of The Ashes - a cricketing comedy for Radio 3 (1992), A Ladder in the Stocking - for Radio 4 (1991), and a serialisation of The Queen and I for Radio 4.
In 1991 Leicester University awarded her an Honorary MA and in 2001 she published The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman aged 55 3/4 (2001), a collection of monthly columns written for Sainsbury's magazine from 1993-2001. Her most recent book is Queen Camilla (2006).