Tayeb Salih

Tayeb Salih was born on the twelfth of July 1929 at the village of Karmakol on the Nile at the north of Sudan — the same village he would furnish as the principal setting of Season of Migration to the North thirty-seven years later — the son of a farmer of the Shaiqiyya tribe and a household member of the Sufi religious establishment.

He was raised in the village agrarian household of his father and educated at the Wad Madani village school and the Gordon Memorial College at Khartoum — subsequently the University of Khartoum — completing the bachelor’s degree there in 1952 in literature.

He taught primary school briefly at Khartoum on the close of the degree and went to London in 1953 to take graduate study in international affairs at the University of London Institute of Education. He took employment at the close of the graduate course in the Arabic Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation at Bush House, London, where he served the Arabic Service for ten years from 1953 to 1963 and rose to head of drama.

He was named in 1963 director-general of information of the Ministry of Information of the Emirate of Qatar at Doha, the post he held until 1974, and from 1974 to 1979 the UNESCO regional representative for the Arab Gulf at Paris.

He published in 1962 the novella The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid in the magazine Hiwar — the Arabic literary review at Beirut edited by Tawfiq Sayigh — and in 1966 the novel Mawsim al-Hijra ila ash-Shamal (Season of Migration to the North) in the same magazine. The novel chronicled the return to Karmakol of the protagonist Mustafa Sa’eed after a seven-year academic career at London and his subsequent collapse — and was at the time of publication and is now recognised as the principal Arabic-language novel of the post-colonial encounter with Europe.

The Arab Literary Academy of Damascus named Mawsim al-Hijra ila ash-Shamal in 2001 the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century — over Mahfouz (placed in this archive), Munif and Idris.

He published five further novels and short-fiction collections across the following thirty years — among them Urs al-Zayn (The Wedding of Zein, 1969) and Bandarshah (1971–1976).

He died at the King’s College Hospital, London on the eighteenth of February 2009 of complications of kidney failure, at seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the author of Season of Migration to the North.