Susan Sontag dies aged 71

NEW YORK - Author and social critic Susan Sontag, one of the strongest voices of intellectual opposition to US policies after the September 11 attacks, has died at age 71 at a New York cancer hospital.

Sontag, who had suffered from leukaemia for some time, was known for interests that ranged from French existentialist writers to ballet, photography and politics.

She was the author of 17 books and a lifelong human rights activist, and her work has been translated into more than 30 languages. Among her best known works was a 1964 study of homosexual aesthetics called "Notes on Camp."

Sontag was among the first to raise a dissenting voice after September 11, 2001, in a controversial New Yorker magazine essay arguing that talk of an "attack on civilisation" was "drivel."

She ignited a firestorm of criticism when she declared that the attacks were not a "cowardly attack" on civilisation but "an act undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions".

Sontag has since been an outspoken critic of US President George W. Bush over his response to the September 11 attacks and particularly the US-led war in Iraq.

"I can confirm she passed away this morning," a spokeswoman at New York's Sloan Kettering hospital said but declined to give any more details.

Born in New York in 1933, Sontag grew up in Arizona and Los Angeles before going to the University of Chicago, and later Harvard and Oxford. She wrote novels, non-fiction books, plays and film-scripts as well as essays for The New Yorker, Granta, the New York Review of Books and other literary titles.

A long-time opponent of war and a human rights activist, Sontag spent several years in Sarajevo and staged Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" there under siege in the summer of 1993.

From 1987 to 1989 she was president of the American Centre of PEN, an international writers' organization dedicated to freedom of expression, where she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.

In 2003 she was awarded a peace prize in Germany and the Prince of Asturias Prize in Spain. Earlier honours included the US National Book Award for her novel "In America" in 2000.

- REUTERS