Google celebrates Tayeb Salih’s birthday

CAIRO -12 July 2017: Google Doodle celebrates Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih’s birthday Wednesday.

Salih is a Sudanese novelist who was born in Al-Dabbah in North Sudan to a humble farmer family. He began his educational journey at a Quranic school and later at the Gordan Memorial College. He studied at the University of Khartoum and worked as a teacher before moving to London to further advance his education at the University of London where he started working for the BBC.

He also worked for Ministry of Information in Qatar and the UNESCO in Paris. He discovered his undying love for literature when he started writing a weekly column for al Majala, an Arabic magazine based in London, for more than 10 years.

Season of Migration to the North, or Mawsim Al Hijra Ila Al-Shimal in Arabic, is one of Salih’s most popular works that drew great success in the Middle East marking him as a genius of Arabic literature.

Season of Migration to the North, originally published in 1966, is a fiction novel that walks you through the fictional life of a man who, after spending all his life studying abroad, returned to his home village only to find out that he has been replaced.

Through various melodramatic monologues, the novel draws the differences between the rural cities of Northern Sudan and metropolitan city of London in the 1920s.

His fiction novel is a vague complex criticism of colonialism and has been translated to over 30 languages.

Despite his worldwide fame, the novel was banned in Sudan for several years. Salih also published Urs' al-Zayn (the Wedding of Zain, 1964), Daw al-Bayt (Bandarshah I, 1971), Maryud (Bandarshah II, 1976), Al-Rajul al Qubrosi (the Cypriot Man, 1978) and Doumat Wad Hamid (The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid, 1985), however the booming success of Season of Migration to the North overshadowed Salih’s later work.

Nonetheless, Season of Migration to the North has been adapted as a play in Israel and the Wedding of Zain was adapted to a drama that won an award in Cannes Festival in the 1970s.

Salih passed away in early 2009 at the age of 80 in London as a result of kidney failure.