SALIH, AT-TAYYIB

born 1929, ash-Shamaliyah province, Sudan Arabic-language novelist and short-story writer. Salih attended universities in the Sudan (in Khartoum) and in London and devoted much of his professional life to radio broadcasting, for many years as head of drama for the BBC Arabic Service. Salih, coming from a rural background of small farmers and orthodox religious teachers, attempted in his work to harmonize the traditions of the past with the worldliness of the traveled man, the African who has returned from schooling abroad. His novel Season of Migration to the North (1966; Eng. trans. 1969) is a prose poem that reflects the conflicts of modern Africa: traditions and common sense versus education, rural versus urban, men versus women, and the specific versus the universal. Salih's prose (translated from the Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies) is polyrhythmic and haunting. Salih also wrote The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories (1969). These tales evoke the warmth, compassion, humour, and sadness of traditional Sudanese Arabic life, examining authority and unwritten codes through its beautifully structured narrative rhythms.