Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died on 3 August, 2008, aged 89, was the Russian author and historian who brought the world's attention to the human rights abuses of the Soviet Union's Gulags.

His semi-fictional novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) was the first time conditions in the labour camps were put into print.

He had been sentenced to eight years' hard labour after being stripped of his position of army captain at the end of the Second World War for writing anti-Stalinist remarks in a letter to a friend.

His writings on the Soviet regime - most notably his history, The Gulag Archipelago - earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, the Templeton Prize and the Russian State prize for humanitarianism but also exile from the USSR in 1974.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on 11 December, 1918, in Kislovodsk, a city in the south west of Russia. His father died before he was born and his mother raised him and his four siblings during the hardship of the Russian Civil War. She herself died when he was 22, but not before instilling the value of education in her son.

He studied mathematics at Rostov State University and also took correspondence courses in the classics from the Moscow Institute. He commanded an anti-artillery unit on the Eastern front during the war and was twice decorated for gallantry. But to his astonishment he was arrested in February 1945 for "anti-Soviet propaganda" - the staunch Marxist had referred to Stalin as "the whiskered one" and questioned his leadership in a private letter.

Without trial he was sentenced to eight years' labour and lifelong internal exile and his faith in the Communist ideology was diminished in a dash. When he was released in 1953 he was banished to Kazakhstan where he faced another hardship, a battle with cancer that nearly ended his life. He was also wracked with guilt over his role in the Red Army and it was through his writing that he began to reconcile these traumatic experiences.

One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich was a largely autobiographical account of life inside the Gulag, documenting the brutality of the guards and the punishment of the work, but also the resilience of the prisoners. He would write many times about the Gulags, in novels such as The First Circle (1968) and his play The Tenderfoot and the Tart (1969). He fictionalised his illness in Cancer Ward (1968) and in The Soul and Barbed Wire (1978) he compared his role in the war to that of the men who ran the prison camps, saying "So were we any better?"

His writing - quickly outlawed by the Soviet authorities but nevertheless widely read thanks to underground presses - was revelatory because it was the first time the merciless labour camps had been discussed in literature. Though the USSR attempted to distance itself from Stalinism after his death in 1953, Solzhenitsyn's venom for his former tormentors was felt too strongly by the current regime and he was constantly harassed by the KGB as a result.

Meanwhile in the West he became the first Russian author to reach the best seller list and was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. Though it was his revelations about the terrible conditions within the prisons that caused the biggest stir, Solzhenitsyn's work maintained a philosophical, even optimistic streak - Ivan Denisovich's story ends with the inmate upbeat at having completed his day's work and squirreled away valuable rations. The author had a great faith in the ability of the human spirit to overcome hardship and to transcend the atrocities that it might suffer at the hands of tyrants.

He had received a reprieve after the fall of Stalinist rule, allowing him to return to Russia as a teacher (he wrote in secret in the evenings). But after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973 he was banished for a second time. He went to America where he was first hailed as a hero of freedom but quickly denounced because he retained anti-capitalist views.

He seemed to have become conditioned to solitude and lived most of his life in seclusion. He continued to write to a schedule of extreme self-discipline and his work often took priority over his family. In 1994 he was repatriated to his homeland but continued to prove himself a thorn in the side of the authorities with controversial books about the future of democratic Russia.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was married twice and had two sons, died of a reported heart failure in Moscow after a period of illness.