Susan Sontag dies

Susan Sontag, the author, activist and self-defined “zealot of seriousness” whose voracious mind and provocative prose made her a leading intellectual of the past half century, died in New York today. She was 71.

She had been treated for breast cancer in the 1970s and died in the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre.

She wrote the best-selling historical novel The Volcano Lover, and in 2000 won the National Book Award for the historical novel In America.