Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih has died in London, aged about 80. He was suffering from kidney failure in the last year. Salih graduated from the Faculty of Science in Khartoum. He worked as a teacher and a broadcaster for the BBC Arabic Service. He also worked as representative of UNESCO in the Gulf States from 1984 to 1989, and in Doha in the Qatari Ministry of Information.
His novel Season of Migration to the North, which has been translated into several languages, was selected by the Committee of Arab writers as the most important novel in the twentieth century. Salih also wrote "The Wedding of Zein," which was turned into a film and won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976. Salih was famous for his writing about politics, colonialism, Arab society and its relationship with the West and the differences between Western and Eastern civilizations. Salih is one of the most famous writers, thanks to his short stories which have the same importance of great writers like Gobran Khalil Gobran, Taha Hussein and Naguib Mahfouz. He wrote many articles for magazines and newspapers. Saleh was born in 1929 in the northern Sudanese town of Marawi to a poor family. He had a clear imprint in the spread of the Sudanese literature and culture all over the world.
