SHE’S been nicknamed “the Mouth from the South” thanks to her quickfire humour, endless put-downs and hilarious one-liners.

Keeping up with wise-cracking Australian wit Kathy Lette, whose books include Puberty Blues, Mad Cows and How To Kill Your Husband (And Other Handy Household Hints), can be an exhausting experience.

We last met nearly ten years ago, when she was writer-in-residence at London’s swanky Savoy Hotel for three months, pestering her friends to ring her up and ask her the time, just so she could say, “Let me look out of the window at Big Ben”.

Since then, her first novel Puberty Blues has been made into a mini-series, she has sold the rights of To Love, Honour and Betray to the BBC, while Emily Mortimer has bought the rights to The Boy Who Fell To Earth.

A former TV sitcom writer for Columbia Pictures, more recently Sydneyborn Lette penned some dialogue for the 500th episode of The Simpsons – but there are no trips to Hollywood planned at the moment, she says.

“I love Ian McEwan’s line about Hollywood – that you go there and lie by a pool while people betray you,” she muses.

Today, she’s still spouting off about men’s weaknesses and women’s strengths in hilarious tones similar to those in her novels, banging the drum for women’s rights through her satirical prose. But has she mellowed in the last decade?

“Oh, darling, no!” she exclaims. “It’s unseemly. I should have mellowed now, but no. It’s getting embarrassing. I’ve actually got a little bit wilder.

I’m 54 and found that once you hit menopause you just become so liberated.

“I used to so dread hitting 50 that I couldn’t say it. I’d go ‘Fa-fa-fa-fa’. I used to tell people I was approaching 40 but not saying from which direction. Then once I’d turned 50 I felt fantastically free. I’ve swung off more chandeliers in the last couple of years than I ever did.”

She even tried to spice up a rather stuffy royal polo event by jokingly offering to French-kiss Princes William and Harry when she was presenting the cups, causing great hilarity among the royals. You can almost imagine her husband’s eyes turning skywards.

Lette, who is married to human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robinson, with whom she has two children, Julius and Georgie, plays for laughs but behind the fireball of fun is an extremely intelligent woman who has long fought for women’s rights through her craft.

“If you can sugar-coat your message with humour, you’re much more likely to have an impact,” she insists.

Her latest book, Love Is Blind, is a bite-sized novel penned as part of the Quick Reads campaign, an adult literacy charity producing six new titles by famous authors in an attempt to hook reluctant readers.

Lette’s contribution, in all its pinkjacketed glory, is about Jane, a woman who moves to the Australian outback in search of a husband, to the horror of her prettier sister Anthea, who already has a fiance.

In typical Lette style, she shows how women stick together when the chips are down and, perhaps more unusually, that not all men are idiots (but some are).

Her next book is set in the law courts of London and she promises it will be female-led, funny and feisty.

There’s little doubt Lette will be having the last laugh.

  • Love Is Blind by Kathy Lette is published by Black Swan, priced £1.