Sharpe in his own words

In May 2011, Cat­alo­nia Today had the ho­n­our to an­nounce that the nov­el­ist Tom Sharpe, the most dis­tin­guished Eng­lish writer liv­ing in Cat­alo­nia at the time, had agreed to be­come the Hon­orary Pres­i­dent of the mag­a­zine’s com­mu­nity of read­ers, the Eng­lish Cul­ture Club.

“We are de­lighted to have Tom Sharpe as the Club’s hon­orary pres­i­dent, be­cause we think he brings to­gether two char­ac­ter­is­tics that sym­bol­ise the Club’s spirit: he is a lead­ing fig­ure in the Eng­lish arts, and he is an adopted Cata­lan who loves Cat­alo­nia,” wrote Germá Capdev­ila, the then ed­i­tor of Cat­alo­nia Today. The mag­a­zine had just joined forces with the Aba­cus book­shop chain to cre­ate Cat­alo­nia’s first Eng­lish Cul­ture Club. The same day, Sharpe replied: “I am deeply ho­n­oured by your offer and I ac­cept with grat­i­tude.”

Sharpe, an early cru­sader against racism and South Africa’s apartheid sys­tem, pub­lished his first best-seller, Ri­otous As­sem­bly, in 1971, a pow­er­ful de­nun­ci­a­tion of the South African po­lice. Then came the Wilt books and huge in­ter­na­tional suc­cess, and the rest, as they say, is his­tory.

Sharpe died at the ripe age of 85 on June 6, 2013, in the Costa Brava town of Llafranc, where he had lived since the early nineties. Now, in fond mem­ory of “our” Tom Sharpe, we are de­lighted to an­nounce a new se­ries fea­tur­ing the writer’s un­pub­lished mem­oirs (cour­tesy of Dr. Montser­rat Verda­guer and the Tom Sharpe Foun­da­tion). Sharpe ap­pointed Verda­guer, who was also his physi­cian and part­ner, his of­fi­cial bi­og­ra­pher on Au­gust 2, 2001. For the next 12 years, the two formed a work­ing part­ner­ship with Sharpe dic­tat­ing his work to Verda­guer on a daily basis.

Co­in­cid­ing with Sant Jordi’s Day, Cat­alo­nia’s an­nual cel­e­bra­tion of read­ing, we are de­lighted to an­nounce the first in­stal­ment of 24 pre­vi­ously un­pub­lished au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal let­ters that Sharpe began to write to an imag­i­nary re­searcher, Mon­sieur Print­emps, in 1998 (see pages 22-23). Fea­tur­ing Sharpe’s un­pub­lished mem­oirs every month in the pages of Cat­alo­nia Today is a mat­ter of pride for us as a team and, no doubt, also for our read­ers.