Author Louise Rennison remembered for her wicked sense of humour

Louise wrote ten bestselling novels about teenage girls' hero Georgia Nicolson

In 2004 she told The Argus the epitaph she would write for herself and her most famous character.

She said: "I thought hard for the first one and said something like: ‘She gave a great deal of pleasure to many.’

"For Georgia I instantly came out with: ‘It’s a tragedy she died so young.’ ”

Her death following a short illness at the age of 64 last week made both eulogies come true.

Remembered for her wicked sense of humour, Louise performed stand up at Edinburgh festival and broadcast with John Peel before turning her skill of making people laugh to her own difficult teenage years - realised through her heroine Georgia.

Fellow children's author Philip Ardagh paid tribute to Rennison as his "hero".

He said: "Louise was the only fellow children’s author I’ve ever met who always seemed to have a glass of beer next to her on her signing table, regardless of the time of day. One of my fondest memories was when I chaired an event of hers at the Edinburgh book festival. We’d agreed beforehand that I’d simply top and tail her talk: introduce her at the beginning; sit in the audience; thank her at the end. No real preparation required on my part. She arrived at the authors’ yurt just five minutes before she was due to go on. “I’m pissed,” she said. “Interview me after all.” So on we went and I did interview her and, as always, she laughed at her own anecdotes – along with a delighted audience – and, as always, she ended up Irish dancing across the stage.

"She was prolific. So, greatly saddened though I am that she died, far, far too young, there is comfort in the fact that her laughter lives on through the pages of her books. She was a class act and one funny lady."

Known for her love of a good time - she once prepared for a photoshoot in The Argus by dressing in a Vivian Westwood corset and fluffy mules at breakfast time saying "I always like to be ready for a party".

Louise arrived in Brighton in 1982 - overcoming an " excruciating" audition process performing as an embryo - to get on an expressive arts course at Brighton Polytechnic - now the University of Brighton.

She said: "They turned me down initially because they said I hadn’t done any performing and I said, ‘but that’s exactly why I want to do the course’."

But she credited her move to the city - as well as her awkward puberty - for her later successes.

Speaking in 2009 she said: "I was older than the confident teenagers who turned up lugging huge portfolios of artwork. I had a sketch of a daffodil.

"To be perfectly frank I more or less willed myself on to the course. The tutors (saints and martyrs one and all... Peter Hawes, Liz Aggiss, Billy Cowie, John Holloway et al) gave me what turned out to be, in every way the chance of a lifetime.

"A cornucopia of talent and inspiration poured into the college, the performance lunchtimes were legendary."

"We even got our own public playing arena in the Zap Club along with Open Secret, Ian Smith, Birds with Ears, Divas, Theatre of the Bleeding Obelisk, Eddie Izzard and others. I leaped about in a false beard in Women with Beards. My fond recollection is that four of us went on stage (in our beards) and yelled ‘All men are rubbish’ and went off to massive feminist applause. Happy days. Things were so simple then. It was all the boys’ fault, with the exception of Maggie Thatcher who was in fact a boy with a handbag."

Her satirical take on Margaret Thatcher’s government, performed to a largely male audience at the Brighton Conservative headquarters, was slightly less well received.

Her first major success was with Stevie Wonder Felt My Face, which retold her journey through her teenage experiences to her life in London, where Stevie Wonder did, indeed, feel her face.

The show premiered in Brighton and, to her delight, was a televised highlight at the Edinburgh Festival. She then took it on tour for four years.

The show led to her appearing on BBC Radio Four programmes, such as John Peel’s Home Truths, and writing a weekly column in the Evening Standard.

She was then approached to see if she would write a book.

Her ground-breaking debut novel Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging was published in 1999 and was the first of ten stories about the heroine based on her own youngster self. It was made into a film, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging.

Later sold to the US for a six-figure sum, Louise had to provide a glossary for transatlantic readers to get to grips with terms like y-fronts, nuddy pants and snogging.

Louise was crowned Queen of Teen in 2008, and she won the Roald Dahl funny prize in 2010 with Withering Tights, the tale of Georgia Nicolson’s gawky younger cousin Tallulah Casey, beating David Walliams’s Mr Stink, illustrated by Quentin Blake, to the title.

Tributes to Louise paid reverence to a comic voice that spoke to a generation of teenage girls.

Praise for Louise also poured in from fellow writers.

Patrick Ness said: "Kids just laugh and laugh and laugh at her books, which is the best sort of miracle. RIP."

Holly Smale, author of Geek Girl, described her as "Such a wonderful, talented and funny writer."

Having moved to Brighton in the 1980s, Louise made the city her home and was bemused at becoming part of the establishment.

In 2005, after donating £50,000 for a garden at one of her favourite places, the The Old Market in Upper Market Street, Hove, she joked: "I am now in the very ironic position of being almost a pillar of the community."

As a successful author Louise was reunited with the daughter Kim she had given up for adoption.

She took Kim to The Grand to drink champagne for their first meeting but said she had "failed again, abysmally, " at becoming a mother - however the pair went on to become best friends.

Kim said of her birth mother "I call her my little sister, but that's okay. When I want advice from someone who knows me better than I know myself, I phone Lou and whatever it is she's usually been through it."