British author Muriel Spark dies in Italy aged 88

ROME, Apr 15 (Reuters) Scottish-born novelist Muriel Spark has died in Italy at the age of 88 and will be buried in Tuscany later today, an Italian official said.

''She was very open. Both fascinating and down-to-earth at the same time. Her loss will be very difficult to overcome,'' Massimiliano Dindalini, the mayor of the little Italian town where she lived, told Reuters by telephone.

Spark wrote 24 novels, several short stories and three well-received biographies during her long career.

But she is best known for her 1962 fictional work ''The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'', a tense novel about a young teacher stirring thoughts of emancipation at an Edinburgh girls' school in staid society between the two world wars.

The book was made into a critically acclaimed film starring Maggie Smith in 1969.

Spark died yesterday in a hospital in Florence after battling health problems since last year.

Born Muriel Sarah Camberg, Spark moved to Italy in the late 1960s and has lived in the small town of Civitella in Val di Chiana for 27 years. Her funeral will be held there today.

Spark, born in February 1918 in Edinburgh to a Jewish father and Anglican mother, married in 1937 and moved to Southern Rhodesia -- now Zimbabwe -- but the marriage did not last.

During World War Two she worked for the British Foreign Office on anti-Nazi propaganda.

She converted to Catholicism in 1954 and moved to Italy in 1967.

Twice nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize -- in 1968 for Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent -- Spark won the Bram Stoker prize in 1987 for her biography of Mary Shelley.

A self-styled ''experimentalist'', she was hailed as being far ahead of her time both in her style of writing and the subjects she chose, using her sharp satire to expose pettiness and vanity pervading all facets of life and death.

Made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, Spark has lived with artist Penelope Jardine for 30 years.

She was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978, and Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 1996.

Her last novel, The Finishing School, was published in 2004.

REUTERS SHB RN1804