The Spanish novelist Javier Marías, author of All Souls, A Heart so White, and the epic, three-part Your Face Tomorrow – and a writer regularly touted as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature – has died at home in Madrid at the age of 70. Marías, who had been ill with pneumonia for the past month, died on Sunday, according to his publisher, Alfaguara. “It is with enormous sadness that we regret to inform you that our great author and friend Javier Marías has died in Madrid this afternoon,” the publisher said in a brief statement. Tributes to Marías, who was also a celebrated translator and columnist, flooded in. Writing in El País, his friend and fellow writer Eduardo Mendoza said Marías had overcome his early influences to “to find a voice, a subject and a style that were so distinctively his own that they turned him into a strange phenomenon”. He added: “Javier Marías’s writing doesn’t resemble anyone else’s. It’s easy to parody, but impossible to imitate.” Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called Marías “one of the great writers of our time” and said Sunday was “a sad day for Spanish literature”. The Spanish journalist and writer Rosa Montero said she had been “hit for six” by the news, adding: “For me, he was the best candidate for the Nobel in today’s Spain.” Pepa Bueno, the editor in chief of El País, to which Marías was a regular contributor, said: “The death of Javier Marías is so painful. Today is a day of mourning in Spanish literature and column-writing. [He leaves] a huge void in the paper.” Marías, who was born in the Spanish capital in 1951, published his debut novel, The Dominions of the Wolf, at the age of 20. It was followed by 15 others, among them All Souls, which was inspired by his time teaching at Oxford University, and A Heart So White, a mysterious meditation on love, family and the past that is perhaps his best-known book. Despite being a member of Spain’s Royal Academy and an international member of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature, Marías was not easily impressed with some literary gongs. He caused a stir in 2012 when he turned down Spain’s €20,000 national narrative prize for his novel The Infatuations. Although he insisted the refusal was not a snub and had been motivated by his lifelong opposition to the way Spain awards state-backed literary prizes, it did not go down well with the organisers. “All my life I have managed to avoid state institutions, regardless of which party was in government, and I have turned down all income from the public purse,” he said. “I don’t want to be seen as an author who is favoured by any particular government.” Marías also claimed to have spent his entire career improvising for the lack of a literary project. “But I do recognise certain recurring themes: treason, secrecy, the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure,” he once said. “There is also persuasion, marriage and love. But these things are the matter of literature, not just of my books. The history of literature is probably the same drop of water falling on the same stone only with different language, different manners, different forms adequate to our own time. But it remains the same thing, the same stories, the same drop on the same stone, since Homer or before.” Earlier this year, when asked by El País what inspired him to write, he replied: “I write about what seems to me to be particularly serious, dangerous, unfair or stupid. Obviously, I sometimes get it wrong or I can go very much against the current.”