The Scottish-born writer Dame Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, has died in Tuscany.

By the time of her death at 88, she'd written more than 20 books. Her spare prose and finely crafted humour found favour with both literary judges and the reading public: she won numerous awards including the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992, and the British Literature Prize in 1997.

In a retrospective in The Observer, fellow Scots novellist Ruaridh Nicholl says:

In that way of Robert Louis Stevenson and James Hogg, it's impossible to imagine Scotland without her. The mirrors these writers held up were so flawless that they defined a nation.

Incidentally, Spark reviewed and praised Maurice Shadbolt's first book, the 1959 collection of stories called The New Zealanders. Spark's review gave Shadbolt valuable publicity in Britain, in contrast to the generally negative response he received in New Zealand.

The Scotsman obit is here and the New York Times tribute is here.