German novelist Guenter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning author of "The Tin Drum", an epic treatment of the Nazi era, died on Monday at the age of 87, his publishers said.

A broad-shouldered man with a drooping moustache, Grass spurned the German tradition of keeping a cool intellectual distance, insisting that a writer's duty was to be at the frontline of moral and political debate.

For many, he was the voice of a German generation that came of age in World War Two and bore the burden of their parents' guilt for the atrocities of the Nazis, although a belated revelation in 2006 that he had served in the Nazi Waffen-SS as a teenager cast some doubt on his moral authority.

Grass was born in the Baltic port of Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland, in 1927 and much of his fiction was set in the city.

He died in a hospital in Luebeck, near his home in northern Germany. His publishers gave no details of the cause of death