Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died

BBC radio news is reporting the death in Moscow at the ago of 89 of the Russian novelist. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and was an icon of resistance to the Soviet regime.

There is a self-penned profile of him on the Nobel Prize site.

Later. Monsters and Critics quotes the Russian news agency Interfax:

The world famous writer and historian had not been seen in public for months. He died from the aftermath of a stroke, according to unconfirmed information.

Solzhenitsyn's main work was the Gulag Archipelago in 1973, which described the years of Stalinist terror using thousands of details and individual cases.

The 1970 Nobel winner has reportedly been seriously ill for months.