Tayeb Salih

Salih was born in a village on the Nile in northern Sudan, studied at the University of Khartoum, and worked for nearly thirty years for the BBC Arabic Service in London — the same outsider's vantage point that supplied so much of his fiction. He published only a handful of novels and stories across his lifetime, but the influence of those few books on Arabic literature is enormous.

Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal (Season of Migration to the North, 1966) is a postcolonial inversion of Heart of Darkness: a Sudanese narrator returns from study in England to find a stranger in his village whose past — as a brilliant economist, predatory lover of English women, and convicted murderer in 1920s London — slowly subsumes his own. Edward Said called it one of the six finest novels in modern Arabic literature; the Damascus-based Arab Literary Academy named it the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century in 2001.

The earlier novella The Wedding of Zein (1962) and the linked Wad Hamid stories take place in the same Nile-bend village and form, with Season, a single connected world — a kind of Sudanese Yoknapatawpha in which the question of how a small Muslim community holds together under colonial and post-colonial pressure is worked out in the lives of villagers, sheikhs, riverboat travellers, and returning sons.

Salih wrote almost nothing after the early 1970s, and refused interviews about why. He died in London in 2009 and was buried in Sudan. The annual Tayeb Salih International Award for Creative Writing, established in his honour, has become one of the most important literary prizes for Arabic-language fiction by Sudanese and African Arab writers.