Amos Oz, Israel's best-known author and an outspoken supporter of a two-state solution to its conflict with the Palestinians, died of cancer at the age of 79 on Friday, his daughter said.
Over a 50-year career, Oz chronicled his country's rise from the ashes of the Holocaust and its struggles - among Jews and Arabs, secularists and zealots, conservatives and liberals.
His writing - witty, scholarly, and often moody and erotic - won international plaudits, and he was a frequent bookies' favourite for the Nobel Prize for Literature. But his political views sometimes stirred up rancour at home.
“To those who loved him, thank you,” his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger said in a Twitter post announcing his death.
Born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem to Eastern European immigrants, Oz moved to a kibbutz at 15 after his mother's suicide. He changed his surname to the Hebrew for “might”.
Oz fought in the 1967 and 1973 Middle East wars, experiences that tinged his advocacy for territorial compromise with the Palestinians - though he was more circumspect about prospects for accommodation with Islamist group Hamas ruling Gaza.
