Robert Nye dead: Poet and novelist dies, aged 77

The writer's best-selling novel, Falstaff, won a number of literary prizes

Poet and novelist Robert Nye has died at the age of 77, his agent has announced.

Nye died in the early hours of Saturday at a hospice near Cork, Ireland, his literary agent, Vivienne Schuster of Curtis Brown, said.

Nye's best-selling novel, Falstaff, won the Hawthornden Prize and Guardian Fiction Prize. He won the Eric Gregory Award for one of his collections of poems, Juvenilia 2.

He was also a literary journalist, and worked as a poetry critic for The Times.

Nye was born in London in 1939 and had lived in Ireland for some years.