The philosopher and novelist Dame Iris Murdoch died with her husband by her side in an Oxford nursing home yesterday afternoon at the age of 79.
The author of 26 novels was one of only two writers to win both the Whitbread Prize and the Booker Prize.
Her husband of 43 years, Dr John Bayley, who nursed her through four years of Alzheimer's disease was with her when she died at 4 p.m., a family member said.
Murdoch was born in Blessington Street, Dublin in 1919, the only child of a Belfast man who worked in the British civil service. Her mother had trained as an opera singer, a career cut short when she married at the age of 18.
She often spoke of childhood holidays in the Dun Laoghaire area. "That coastline was a childhood paradise, a wonderful place," she once said.
Although she spent most of her childhood holidays in Ireland her family moved to Britain when she was less than a year old.
Murdoch was educated at Badimton School in Bristol and took a degree in classics at Somerville College Oxford in 1942. She left with ambitions to become an archaeologist and art historian.
However, she was conscripted days after her graduation and spent two years working in a Whitehall treasury office before moving on to work for the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Belgium and Austria.
In 1947 she returned to academia and held the year-long Sarah Smithson Studentship in Philosophy at Newnham College Cambridge. The following year she was made a fellow of St Anne's College Oxford and a lecturer in philosophy, a post she held for 15 years.
Murdoch's first novel was published in 1953. Under the Net was described as a blend of fantasy and humour. She won the Whitbread Prize in 1974 for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine.
In 1978 she won the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea. She was short-listed for the Booker prize for four other novels.
Her portrait hangs in London's National Portrait Gallery, and she has been an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1975.
She has been honoured by more than 12 universities, including Oxford and Trinity College Dublin. Though shy of publicity, the novelist spoke of her love of the act of writing.
She wrote in long-hand "to get the rhythm of the paragraph right", and in her most prolific period she produced a novel every 18 months.
In 1997 her husband, critic and writer Dr Bayley announced she was suffering from profound Alzheimer's disease. The couple married in 1956.
Dr Bayley said his wife, who once said in a television interview that she never wrote a bad sentence, could not remember the names of any of the books she had written.
He wrote a moving memoir to her last year called simply Iris.