MADRID, Jan 17: Nobel literature prize winner Camilo Jose Cela, a giant of the Spanish literary world, died of heart failure in a Madrid clinic on Thursday, the clinic said.

Cela, who was 85 and had used a pacemaker for several years, had been taken to Madrid’s Cemtro clinic a few days earlier complaining of breathing difficulties.

Tributes poured in from fellow writers and politicians for the outspoken and irreverent Cela, who crowned a long and prolific career by winning the Nobel prize in 1989.

“We have lost probably the most universal writer Spain had in the second half of the 20th century,” Spanish Culture Minister Pilar del Castillo told national radio.

His books “express a depth of feeling and, above all, his roots deep in (Spanish) conflicts,” he told Reuters by telephone from his home in Spain’s Canary Islands.

“All this is put to work, finally, by a language that is really extraordinary and dazzling.”

Cela was best known for his 1942 novel “The Family of Pascual Duarte” — about a peasant unable to suppress a killer’s instinct instilled in him by a hostile environment.

It was hailed as a landmark in the barren years of Spanish literature following the victory of right-wing dictator General Francisco Franco in the 1936-39 civil war.

WIDELY READ: Initially censored in Spain, the book was published instead in Buenos Aires.