Publisher says novelist Kent Haruf dies at age 71

DENVER (AP) — Award-winning novelist Kent Haruf has died at age 71.

Haruf's editor at Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group confirmed Haruf's death Sunday. Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards says Haruf, the author of Plainsong and Eventide, had been battling cancer.

Haruf spent two years in the Peace Corps in Turkey and returned to the United States to fine-tune his fiction at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop.

The Tie That Binds, his first novel, was published in 1984, winning a Whiting Writers' Prize and finishing as a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award for first fiction. His next book, Where You Once Belonged, came out six years later.

Many of Haruf's novels were set in the fictional small town of Holt, Colorado, a composite of the three Colorado towns where the author grew up.