Günter Grass dies: Salman Rushdie leads tributes to 'a true giant'

Günter Grass, Germany’s Nobel Prize-winning author of The Tin Drum, has died in hospital aged 87.

Friend and fellow writer Salman Rushdie led the tributes, tweeting: "This is very sad. A true giant, inspiration, and friend. Drum for him, little Oskar."

Translator Anthea Bell said he was "a literary figure of the most enormous stature in post-war German letters, and throughout the world”.

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Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999 for The Tin Drum, which became a post-Second World War classic and was adapted into an Oscar- and Palme d’Or-winning film. The Nobel committee said it was as if German literature had been granted "a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction".

Much of his work focused on the Nazi era, the horrors of the war and German guilt, with The Guardian describing him as a "figure of enduring controversy". Grass was born in 1927 to Polish-German parents and was conscripted into the army when he was 17 years old.

He served in the Waffen-SS and spent months in an American prisoner-of-war camp. There were calls for him to return his Nobel Prize after he admitted to serving in the SS during an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2006.

Rushdie has defended his friend on numerous occasions – including when he was banned from going to Israel because of a controversial poem. "If you were a teenager and a Nazi came to conscript you, and a refusal meant death, would you choose to die? ... To be a conscript is not [to] be a Nazi," he said according to The Daily Telegraph.

A novelist, poet, drummer and sculptor, Grass was often described as "Germany's conscience". He campaigned for peace and the environment and was a vocal critic of German reunification, which he compared to Hitler’s “annexation” of Austria.

His greatest achievement is that "he managed to make his contribution to debate, however angry, with a quiet smile and twinkle in his hooded eyes," The Observer's Tim Adams wrote in 2002.

"He is a jazz lover, a family man, a generous host (these days offering guests several slugs of his own label 'Nobel' grappa). And of posterity he says only: 'I hope people are still able to laugh when they are reading my books.'"