German novelist Guenter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning author of works such as The Tin Drum, has died at the age of 87, a foundation in his name said on Monday.

Grass, the man with trademark drooping moustache, was born at the Baltic port of Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland, in 1927 and much of his fiction was set in the city.

For many, Grass 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.