Renowned neurologist and author Oliver Sacks has died in New York after a battle with liver cancer.

The London-born academic's 1973 book ‘Awakenings’, about patients who woke up after years spent in a coma, inspired an Oscar-nominated film starring Robert de Niro and Robin Williams.

He wrote several books about unusual medical conditions, including ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat’ and ‘The Island of the Colourblind’.

Between 2007 and 2012, he was professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University in New York.

Sacks was born in North London; the youngest of four children. His father, Samuel Sacks, was a doctor, and his mother, Muriel Elsie Landau, one of the first female surgeons in England.

Landau’s expertise was in obstetrics and gynaecology. However, she also found time to be an active Zionist and to work for many Jewish causes.