This article is more than 12 years old

This article is more than 12 years old

The Soviet dissident writer and Nobel literature prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died aged 89, according to the Interfax news agency.

The agency said he died of a stroke, although his son Stepan Solzhenitsyn said his father died of heart failure. The author had suffered from ill heath, including high blood pressure, in recent years.

Solzhenitsyn served with the Red Army in the Second World War but became one of the most prominent dissidents of the Soviet era, enduring labour camps, cancer and persecution under the Soviet regime.

His experience of the network of labour camps was vividly described in his work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

His key works, including "The First Circle" and "Cancer Ward" brought him world admiration and the 1970 Nobel Literature prize.

He was stripped of his citizenship and sent into exile in 1974 after the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago", his monumental history of the Soviet police state. Solzhenitsyn then moved to the United States, returning to post-Soviet Russia as a hero in 1994.

He was born on December 11 1918, studied physics and mathematics at Rostov University and became a Soviet army officer after Hitler's invasion in 1941.