Sudanese · 1929–2009
Tayeb Salih wrote the Arabic novel most widely studied in translation, Season of Migration to the North, which inverts the colonial narrative by sending an African to conquer London through seduction. Born in a village on the Nile in northern Sudan, he studied in Khartoum and London, then worked for the BBC Arabic Service. His novel's unnamed narrator returns from England to his village, discovering the mysterious Mustafa Sa'eed, whose tale of intellectual brilliance and sexual revenge exposes the psychological violence of colonialism. The novel has been translated into more than twenty languages and is taught alongside Conrad's Heart of Darkness as its postcolonial counterpoint.