After a childhood that he described as a "happy period with moments of terror" and in which he had already shown a vocation for writing, in March 1946 he was called up for military service and joined the army as part of the Royals Marines, although he left after a few months, dissatisfied and disappointed with his abilities as a soldier. Two years later, in the autumn of 1948, he started to study at Pembroke College, one of the oldest colleges at Cambridge University. There he began to study for a bachelor's degree in history, but ended up changing to anthropology. Three years later he graduated in social anthropology having also taken some subjects on the history curriculum. He was always critical of the way the college functioned; he found it too full of classism and despicable snobbery.
In July 1951 travelled to South Africa, where he stayed for ten years, until being deported to England. In South Africa he saw social segregation and the system of apartheid, which he fought against together with friends and members of the Liberal and Communist parties, although he was never a member of the latter. In his early years there he worked as a social worker, administrative officer and superintendent for the Nead (Non-European Affairs Department), and later began teaching in different primary schools around the country. In 1957 he opened a photographic studio, and while combining photography with teaching, he began to portray the lives of black people and the hardships they suffered. He also never stopped writing, driven by the desire to find his literary voice.He had previously explored poetry, but felt it was not for him, and ventured into theatre, writing nine plays (seven have survived). Finally, on 29 October 1961 he was declared undesirable emigrant by the South African government; the South African Special Branch arrested him on 16 December 1961, and after spending several days in prison, he was deported in England on the 28 December 1961.
On 1 September 1963 he began work in Cambridge as a lecturer in 18th-century English history at the Tech (Cambridge College of Arts and Technology). On 10 June 1969 he met Nancy Anne Looper, who he married on 6 August of that same year, and with whom he had three daughters. In 1972, after the huge success of its first novel, Riotous Assembly (1971), he left his job at the Tech to dedicate himself fully to writing, and in 1977 he set up the film production company Clive/Mark/Richard/Sharpe.
In 1992 he travelled to Llafranc, a village that captivated him right from the beginning (he himself explained that "it was love at first sight") and where he would live for the rest of his life (except for occasional periods when he returned to England). In 1994 Sharpe met Dr. Montserrat Verdaguer, whom he would end up commissioning to write his biography "you’ll write my biography when I’m dead". The first Tom Sharpe biography was published in 2023, the work of writer Miquel Martín i Serra in collaboration with Dr. Verdaguer.
In addition to his sixteen novels, plays and poems, he wrote several diaries, recording dreams and outlining novels, and made three attempts at writing an autobiography, a project that he never completed: Letters to Monsieur Printemps, that it started in 1998, A Patchwork Life, of 2001, and A Stranger to Himself. Tom Sharpe’s Autobiography. Some of his novels, which had become true classics of humorous literature, were adapted for television and film, such as Wilt, that was released in 1989. Wilt is his best known work, which has been translated and published all over the world. Moreover, we know that he tried to write a sequel to Porterhouse Blue, but he was not happy with it, and left it unfinished; that he started work on a novel entitled Hacker, but never finished it, and that he started work on a sixth instalment of Wilt, but died before finishing it.
In terms of recognition, his work has been published far and wide and translated into many languages, and has won several awards and accolades, including the Foyle Prize for drama with The South African, the XXIII Grand Prix de l’Humour Noir Xavier Forneret in 1986, the Premi LiberPress Literatura de Girona in 2009 and the La Risa de Bilbao el 2010prize.