Tayeb Salih

Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih died yesterday in London, according to a Reuters report. Salih was one of the great modern African fictions writers, author of classic short novel The Wedding of Zein and The Season of Migration to the North, which the Damascus-based Arab Literary Academy declared “the most important Arabic novel of the 20th century.” The novel was banned by Sudan’s Islamist regime in the 1990s because of its descriptions of a Sudanese intellectual’s sexual experiences in England. Salih was a long time staffer at the BBC Arabic Service and spent the past ten years working for UNESCO.