Stephen Hawking held Prince of Asturias and BBVA awards and was Starmus guest of honour

Hawking, who died peacefully at his home in Cambridge in the early hours of Wednesday morning aged 76, won the Prince of Asturias Award for Concordance for his work 29 years ago.

He was also awarded the BBVA Foundation Borders of Knowledge Prize three years ago.

The scientist behind the 'big bang' theory and the 'Hawking radiation' hypothesis – in which he claimed black holes in space were not completely 'black' but were sources of radioactivity – officially opened Prince of Asturias Awards in February 2005 and presented the global 'Starmus' festival in summer 2016 in Tenerife.

The third edition of the festival was a tribute to the works of the man who wrote the 1988 non-fiction bestseller A brief history of time, and was titled Beyond the horizon: A homage to Stephen Hawking.

The year before, at the press conference ahead of the festival, Hawking said it was 'a pleasure' to be in the Canary Islands again and to 'form part of the history of Starmus', an even he descibed as 'a key event in international scientific discovery'.

At the time, he said: “I feel very honoured to receive this tribute in the third edition and am sure that, once again, the festival will vastly exceed all our expectations.”

When Hawking was due to give his talk at the festival, a 37-year-old stalker from the USA travelled to the Canary Islands where she intended to threaten him once he was on stage.

She was said to be incensed by the cosmologist's theories, which went against her deeply-religious views by claiming the universe had come about through a 'big bang' rather than being created by God in seven days.

Before she could carry out her threats, police raided her hotel room in the popular tourist town of Arona, Tenerife, and found what they called 'arcane' items linked to 'religious extremism' and notes she had written about where Hawking was staying, directions to his hotel and a plan for how to reach him in person.

Although she lived in Norway at the time, the woman – thought to be suffering from psychotic delusions – had apparently followed the scientist round the world.

It was one of Hawking's three children who contacted police in Tenerife after they found over 100 emails and social media posts threatening to kill their father, all written by the same woman.

Lucy, Tom and Robert, mourning the loss of their celebrated father this week, praised his 'courage and persistance', his 'brilliance' and his 'humour', which 'inspired people round the world', and added that they would 'miss him forever'.

Born to a family of intellectuals in Oxford on January 8, 1942, Hawking was just 21 when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative condition which is terminal and eventually leads to complete loss of faculties.

He eventually became completely paralysed and wheelchair-bound and, since 2005, has only been able to speak by moving a small muscle beneath his eye to operate a voice synthesiser.

Hawking's 'metallic' voice has been world-famous for well over a decade now and immediately associated with him.

An OBE with 12 honorary doctorates, Hawking has long been a firm supporter of the British national health service, the NHS, and staunch opponent of the UK's leaving the European Union.

Following the referendum in June 2016 which triggered the Brexit process, Professor Hawking said: “I believe that wealth, the way we understand it and the way we share it, played a crucial role in [voters'] decision.

“If we fail, then the forces that contributed to Brexit, the envy and isolationism not just in the UK but around the world that spring from not sharing, of cultures driven by a narrow definition of wealth and a failure to divide it more fairly, both within nations and across national borders, will strengthen,” Hawking was quoted in British national newspaper Metro yesterday (Wednesday).

“If that were to happen, I would not be optimistic about the long-term outlook for our species.”

Hawking and 149 other Royal Society fellows who agreed with him that Brexit 'would be a disaster for science' signed an open letter expressing their concerns about the loss of EU grants for research in Britain.

Hawking lived in Cambridge for much of his later adult life and, despite his celebrity status, never hid from the public – he was often seen buying top-of-the-range suits at the Suffolk-based men's tailors, Coe's.

And despite the tragedy of the loss of one of science's greatest minds, Professor Hawking is a medical miracle: over 50% of motor neurone disease patients die within two years of diagnosis, and very few live beyond a decade, especially if the condition progresses quickly.

But Hawking, told by medics at the time that he would probably not be alive by his mid-20s, would go on to live another 55 years after being diagnosed.