Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winning author, Elie Wiesel, has died aged 87.

Israel's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem announced his death on Saturday.

Born in 1928, Wiesel wrote extensively of his imprisonment in Nazi camps and in 1986 won the Nobel Prize for peace.

The Nobel selection committee praised him as being "a messenger to mankind; his message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity".

In a tribute to Wiesel, US President Barack Obama called him "one of the great moral voices of our time, and in many ways, the conscience of the world".

"Elie was not just the world's most prominent Holocaust survivor, he was a living memorial," he said.

Wiesel's memoir 'Night' was based on his experience as a teenager in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

His mother and younger sister died in Auschwitz and he was then transferred to Buchenwald with his father, who later perished there.

Two other sisters survived.

The camp was liberated in April 1945, shortly before the end of the war in Europe.

Wiesel settled in France and became a journalist where he began writing a chronicle of his experiences.