Francisco Ayala, an eminent Spanish novelist whose work explored societies in which there is much despotism and little benevolence, died on Tuesday at his home in Madrid. He was 103.

His death was confirmed by Rafael Juarez, director of the Francisco Ayala Foundation in Granada, Spain.

Considered one of 20th-century Spain's most distinguished intellectuals, Ayala was routinely mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Besides being a novelist, he was a poet, critic, essayist, lawyer and academic sociologist. Much of his work was banned in Spain during the Franco era, and Ayala spent those years in exile, teaching in the United States and elsewhere.

Among many laurels, Ayala was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor, in 1991. In 1998 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature; often described as the Spanish Nobel Prize, the award honors world-class achievements in a range of fields.

Though Ayala wrote close to a hundred books, his work is little known in the United States. Much of it, both fiction and nonfiction, examines abuses of power, the nature of morality and the often irreconcilable tension in societies between the needs of the individual and those of the collective.

Only a few of his books have been published in the United States in English translation, and they are out of print. Among them is Death as a Way of Life, originally published in Spanish in 1958 as Muertes de Perro -- literally, Deaths of a Dog. An ironic satire, the novel is set in a fictionalized Latin American nation ruled by a dictator widely assumed to be modeled on Juan Peron, the former Argentine president.

Another title, Usurpers, first appeared in 1949 as Los Usurpadores. A collection of short stories, it explores the lives of people forced to submit to the will of others.

Francisco Ayala Garcia-Duarte was born in Granada on March 16, 1906. He began writing poetry as a boy, and by the age of 19, in 1925, he had published his first novel, Tragicomedia de un Hombre sin Espiritu (Tragicomedy of a Man Without Spirit). He received a doctoral degree in law from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in the early 1930s and afterward joined the faculty there.