MOSCOW, November 9 (RIA Novosti) - Russian physicist and Nobel laureate Vitaly Ginzburg has died in Moscow at the age of 94, a spokeswoman for the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences said on Monday.

"He died on Sunday evening after suffering a heart attack, which followed a long illness," the spokeswoman said, adding that the funeral would take place on Wednesday or Thursday.

Vitaly Ginzburg, the author of 12 books and around 400 scientific articles, was born on October 4, 1916 in Moscow. He was awarded the State Stalin Prize in 1953 and the Lenin Prize in 1966 for his contribution to the development of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal.

In 2003, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids." He shared the award with Russian theoretical physicist Alexei Abrikosov and British-born American physicist Anthony James Leggetthe.

"He was an outstanding physicist...one of the last physicists with an encyclopedic knowledge," Gennady Mesyats, director of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said.