The story of a man undone by a culture that in part created him, ‘Season of Migration to the North’, is a powerful and evocative examination of colonization in two vastly different worlds. When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger – the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the disturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven to take brutal revenge on the decadent West and was, in turn, destroyed by it. Now the terrible legacy of his actions has come to haunt the small village at the bend of the Nile.
Tayeb Salih was born in Northern Sudan in 1929 and educated at the University of Khartoum. After a brief period working as a teacher, he moved to London to work with the BBC Arabic Service. Salih later worked as Director-General of Information in Qatar in the Arabian Gulf; with Unesco in Paris and an Unesco’s representative in the Arab Gulf States. Tayeb Salih is widely acknowledged as one of the most important Arab writers of the 20th century, he died in 2009.