Tayeb Salih
Tayeb Salih طیب صالح
al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ, (born 1929, Al-Shamalīyah province, Sudan—died February 18, 2009, London, England), Arabic-language novelist and short-story writer whose works explore the intersections of traditional and modern life in Africa. He was a writer, cultural journalist for the BBC Arabic program as well as for Arabic journals, and a staff member of UNESCO. He is best known for his novel Season of Migration to the North, considered to be one of the most important novels in Arabic literature.
Translated Titles by Tayeb Salih
Season of Migration to the North
After years of study in Europe, the young man returns to his village along the Nile in post-colonial Sudan. Back home, he discovers a stranger among familiar faces – the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of deadly relationships with women that led to disaster and his eventual return to Sudan.
The Wedding of Zein is a short story by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih. It is set in a small village in Sudan and tells the tale of a young man named Zein who is preparing to get married. Zein is the village idiot, and everyone in the village is dumbfounded when the news goes around that he will be getting married—Zein the freak, Zein who burst into laughter the moment he was born and has kept women and children laughing ever since, Zein who lost all his teeth at six and whose face is completely hairless, Zein married at last? Zein’s particular role in the life of the village has been the peculiar one of falling in love again and again with girls who promptly marry another man. It would be unheard of for him to get married himself.