Mexican writer Jose Emilio Pacheco dies after fall Published duration 27 January 2014

image copyright AP image caption Pacheco won the Cervantes Prize, considered to be the Nobel prize of Spanish-speaking literature

Mexican novelist and poet Jose Emilio Pacheco has died at the age of 74, a day after hurting his head in a fall.

Laura Emilia Pacheco, his daughter, said he died "very peacefully" after suffering a heart attack.

In 2009, Pacheco was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the highest literary honour in the Spanish-speaking world.

The BBC's Juan Carlos Perez Salazar in Mexico says the writer was especially loved in his country where he was regarded as humble and unpretentious.

"With great regret, I have to tell you that my father died," his daughter told journalists at the Mexico City hospital where he died.

Jose Emilio Pacheco was born in Mexico City in 1939, and is best-known for his accounts of adolescents growing up in a corrupt and unjust Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s.

He is seen as one of Mexico's foremost poets and a leading representative of his generation.

He also translated works by Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams and TS Eliot, and taught literature at universities in the US, UK and Canada, besides his work in Mexico.