Tayeb Salih

Salih grew up in a village on the Nile north of Khartoum, the son of a farmer and small trader, and studied in Khartoum before leaving Sudan for London, where he worked for decades as a producer and later head of drama for the BBC Arabic Service. He wrote fiction on the side in a Sudanese Arabic inflected by the English literary tradition he was steeped in professionally.

Season of Migration to the North, published in 1966, was banned for a time in his own country over its sexual candor, and tells of a mysterious returnee whose Cambridge years amounted to a campaign of seduction and revenge against the England that had colonized his home. An Arab academy later named it the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century. Salih spent his later career at UNESCO and Gulf ministries of information before his death in London in 2009.