HONG KONG, Oct. 30 (Xinhua) -- Famous Chinese martial arts novelist Louis Cha Leung-yung, more widely known by his pen name Jin Yong, died at 94 at a hospital in Hong Kong on Tuesday.

Sources close to Cha confirmed the death to Xinhua.

Cha was born on March 10, 1924, in Haining in Zhejiang Province and moved to Hong Kong in the 1940s.

In 1955, he published his first martial arts novel The Book and the Sword, in New Evening Post, under the pen name Jin Yong coincidentally.

The novel was an instant success, and he went on to create 15 extremely popular martial arts novels, ending with The Deer and the Cauldron in 1972.

His martial arts novels have inspired production of movies, TV series, radio dramas, stage dramas, video games and various cultural and creative products, deeply influencing the development of popular culture in China over the past decades.

Cha's martial arts stories have widespread followers in Chinese-speaking regions and have been translated into Korean, English, Japanese, French, Vietnamese, Indonesian and several other languages.

A distinguished literary writer aside, Cha was also a prominent figure in the press, social politics and history study.

He co-founded the Hong Kong daily newspaper Ming Pao in 1959. He then wrote editorials and did translation, essays and reviews on films and dramas for the newspaper in about two decades.