US: Author and social critic Susan Sontag, one of the strongest voices of intellectual opposition to US policies after the September 11th, 2001, attacks, died yesterday at 71 at a New York cancer hospital.
Sontag, who had suffered from leukaemia for some time, was known for interests that ranged from French existentialist writers to ballet, photography and politics.
She was the author of 17 books and a lifelong human rights activist, and her work has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Sontag was among the first to raise a dissenting voice after September 11th, 2001, in a controversial New Yorker magazine essay arguing that talk of an "attack on civilization" was "drivel". She ignited a fire-storm of criticism when she declared that the attacks were not a "cowardly attack" on civilisation but "an act undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions". Sontag has since been an outspoken critic of President Bush over his response to the attacks and particularly the US-led war in Iraq.
"I can confirm she passed away this morning," a spokeswoman at New York's Sloan Kettering hospital said, but declined to give any more details.
Born in New York in 1933, Sontag grew up in Arizona and Los Angeles before going to the University of Chicago, and later Harvard and Oxford. She wrote novels, non-fiction books, plays and film-scripts, as well as essays.