Author, sex therapist and columnist Rose Hacker has died in hospital at the age of 101.

She was widely acknowledged as the world’s oldest columnist and last year was accepted into the Guinness Book of Records.

She joined the Camden New Journal in September 2006 after editor Eric Gordon saw her address a crowd with a speech on nuclear disarmament at a commemoration of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Tavistock Square.

Rose was taken ill a fortnight ago and admitted to the Whittington Hospital in north London where she died yesterday afternoon.

During her illness, the Camden News Journal offices were flooded with cards and messages from well-wishers.

One reader thanked her for "speaking so much sense through all the noise".

She was the author of a lively fortnightly column in the Camden New Journal, her most recent contribution appearing two weeks ago.

The publication of her first column in the New Journal made her an overnight sensation and she has appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, Daily Mail, the Times, the Telegraph and on Woman's Hour.

The new-found success followed her career as a successful author and sex therapist in the 1950s and 1960s.

The author, campaigner, mother, sex therapist, artist, and most recently, journalist, was born in East London in 1906 to Jewish parents.

A clothes designer by trade, she became a radical socialist in the 1930s, visiting the Soviet Union.

Later she joined the Marriage Guidance Council and became one of Britain's first sex therapists and the author of several books on teenage sexuality. In the 1970s she was an elected member of the Greater London Council.