[attach id=245666 size="medium"]February 2002 photo of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the Oscar-winning writer of A Room with A View and Howards End. Photo: PA[/attach]

Oscar-winning screenwriter and award-winning novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has died aged 85.

Firoza Jhabvala said yesterday that her mother died in New York after a long illness.

The German-born writer was a long-time member of Merchant Ivory Productions, writing 22 films over four decades.

She won two Academy Awards for her adaptations of the EM Forster novels Howards End and A Room With A View, and was also nominated for the screenplay for 1993’s The Remains Of The Day.

And she was also recognised for her fiction, receiving Britain’s highest literary honour, the Booker Prize, for her 1975 novel, Heat And Dust.

She is survived by Firoza Jhabvala and two other daughters, her husband, Cyrus Jhabvala, and six grandchildren.