The death of acclaimed novelist and writer Lewis Nkosi is a great loss to South African literature.

Nkosi, described by many as a "giant of South African letters" and one of the voices of the Drum generation of writers, passed away yesterday in Johannesburg at the age of 73, after a long illness.

His close friend and former colleague photographer Alf Kumalo heaped praise on Nkosi for his selfless dedication and commitment to his writing.

The two worked together at the Golden City Post, a sister newspaper to Drum magazine, in the 1950s and 1960s.

"His determination to do well and excel in everything was an inspiration to many of us," Kumalo said.

He and Nkosi also spent time together in London in 1963 and had endless conversations about the state of South Africa.

Nkosi had gone into exile in 1961 after receiving a scholarship to study at Harvard.

Kumalo said: "The young Lewis was very confident, a good writer and we were proud of him."

Kumalo visited Nkosi at a hospice in Houghton, Johannesburg, last week.

"His death is a great loss for South African writing," he said.

Nkosi's twin daughters, Louise and Joy, and his wife, Astrid Starck, were with him at the end.

Nkosi is known chiefly for his studies of contemporary African literature and is the author of the 1986 novel Mating Birds.

He won worldwide acclaim for Mating Birds, which was banned by the apartheid government.

Critics praised his prose style and narrative structure in Mating Birds and several have compared the work with Albert Camus'The Stranger.

Nkosi's last novel, Mandela's Ego, was short-listed for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2007.

The website Book SA yesterday quoted his publisher, Annari van der Merwe, as saying: "If I think about Lewis, two things come to mind: the brilliance of the man's mind, and his sense of irony - of self-irony. And he was quite naughty, but endearingly so.

"For all his bravado, he was sensitive in a way that few men truly are. There was a real empathy with people - and he had a very broad perspective, from having lived in a different cultural environment for so many years.

"The devil inside him prevented him from taking things too literally. It's difficult to think of somebody so vibrant not with us any longer. He will be greatly missed."