LONDON: The British critic and author Alfred Alvarez has died at the age of 90. Alvarez died Monday in London of pneumonia, according to his literary representatives, Aitken Alexander Associates.

Writing alternately as A. Alvarez or Al Alvarez, he had a long, productive and controversial career.

He began as a highly influential critic, who as poetry editor of the Observer was an early champion of Sylvia Plath, her then-husband Ted Hughes, John Berryman and others he believed would shake up the poetry establishment.

He would go on to write novels and poems and a best-seller on suicide that included a long chapter about Plath and an account on his own attempt to kill himself.

(Agencies)