PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid has died from what appears to be an asthma attack at the age of 43.

He was covering events in Syria for the New York Times at the time of his death.

The 43-year-old has long been associated with the Middle East as he has spent most of his career covering stories there.

Last year, he was one of four journalists kidnapped by troops loyal to Muammar Gaddafi. They were held for six days and beaten before being released.

It wasn’t his first dangerous encounter. Back in 2002, he was shot in the shoulder while reporting in Ramallah in the West Bank.

From Lebonese-American heritage, Shadid spent most of his life covering the region with The Associated Press, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post.

He won Pulitzer Prizes in 2004 and 2010 for assignments at the Post. He has also been nominated for an award in international reporting for 2012. The winners will be announced in April.

His nomination from the Times read:

Steeped in Arab political history but also in its culture, Shadid recognised early on that along with the despots, old habits of fear, passivity and despair were being toppled. He brought a poet’s voice, a deep empathy for the ordinary person and an unmatched authority to his passionate dispatches.”

The New York Times said his hiring at the end of 2009 was “a coup for the newspaper”.

Reporting from Tunisia last year, he wrote:

The idealism of the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, where the power of the street revealed the frailty of authority, revived an Arab world anticipating change. But Libya’s unfinished revolution, as inspiring as it is unsettling, illustrates how perilous that change has become as it unfolds in this phase of the Arab Spring.”

Describing his most recent assignment in Syria, the paper said he had been denounced by the authorities there and his family in Lebanon had been “stalked by Syrian agents”.

Despite the perils, the reporter crossed the border to interview protesters.

The apparent asthma attack occurred on Thursday while he was with Times photographer Tyler Hicks. According to the Associated Press, he collapsed while in Syria but Hicks carried his body across the border to Turkey.

“Anthony was one of our generation’s finest reporters,” Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger said in a statement. “He was also an exceptionally kind and generous human being. He brought to his readers an up-close look at the globe’s many war-torn regions, often at great personal risk. We were fortunate to have Anthony as a colleague, and we mourn his death.”

Shadid is survived by his wife, journalist Nada Bakri, and his son Malik and daughter Laila.

-Additional reporting by AP