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Elisabeth Mann Borgese dies in St Moritz

Elisabeth Mann Borgese has died at the age of 83 in St Moritz Keystone Archive

The youngest daughter of the author Thomas Mann has died during a skiing holiday in St Moritz.

The 83-year-old, who was the last living child of the Nobel peace-prize-winner for literature, succumbed to pneumonia in a hospital in Samedan, Graubünden.

Mann, who lived in Küstnacht in canton Zürich from 1933 to 1938 before she immigrated to the United States, visited Switzerland regularly for skiing holidays.

According to a spokesperson for the Suvretta House, the St Moritz hotel where the Mann family used to stay, the law professor even went skiing the day before she died. “Her death came unexpected,” she said.

Skiing was one of Mann’s passions and she was planning to spend the whole of February in the Engadine. “She absolutely loved Switzerland,” said Thomas Sprecher, head of the Swiss Thomas Mann society.

The passionate skier also loved the sea and in 1972 Mann founded the International Oceans Institute in Canada, through which she was trying to encourage world leaders to rethink our relationship with the sea and our management of marine resources

Nicknamed “Mother of the Oceans”, Mann was professor of law and political science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. She has also written many books and papers on the Law of the Sea and ocean affairs.

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