The Icelandic author and playwright, Halldor Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, has died at the age of ninety-five.

A spokesman for his German publisher said he died in a nursing home on Sunday.

He was born in the capital, Reykjavik, but spent his youth in the countryside.

His more than sixty novels, plays and essays often focused on Icelandic peasant life and the quest for independence.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service