Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French writer who pioneered the so-called "new novel" ( nouveau roman ) genre in the 1950s, died on 18 February, 2008, at the age of 85, the Académie française said.

He had been admitted to hospital in the Normandy city of Caen after suffering a heart ailment.

In a series of essays published in 1963, M Robbe-Grillet developed the theory of the "new novel", which sought to overturn conventional ideas on fiction-writing. He advanced a theory that traditional notions such as plot and character should be subordinated to impersonal descriptions of physical things.

He also wrote several best-selling books, including Les Gommes (The Erasers), Le Voyeur and La Jalousie (Jealousy).

He was associated with the "New Wave" of French film-making too, writing the screenplay for Alain Resnais’s L’Année Dernière a Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) and making several films under his own name.

M Robbe-Grillet was born in Brest, Brittany, in 1922 and, after the Second World War worked as a statistician and then agronomist in the Caribbean island of Martinique.

His first published novel – Les Gommes, in 1953 – established him as a leader of a new generation of writers that also included Samuel Beckett, Claude Simon and Natalie Serrault. It tells the story of a murder committed by the detective who has come to investigate it.

M Robbe-Grillet said the term "new novel" was aimed at "all those seeking new forms for the novel ... and all those who have determined to invent the novel, in other words to invent man".

For more than 20 years, from 1970, he taught at the University of New York.

In all, he wrote more than 10 novels, with the last – Un Roman Sentimental (A Sentimental Novel) – appearing in 2007.

In 2004, M Robbe-Grillet was elected to the Academie française – the elite 40-member body that acts as guardian of the French language – but never took his seat. Renowned for his love of provocation, he said it was because he refused to wear the Académie’s elaborate green uniform.

He was survived by his wife, Catherine, also a novelist.