Salih Tributes

I have a small piece on the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih in this week’s issue of Time Magazine.  Here is the opening paragraph:

When I was in college, a friend of mine pressed with great urgency a copy of a slim little novel into my hands, as if he were aware it would satiate a hunger I didn’t know I had. That book was Season of Migration to the North, by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, who passed away in London on Feb. 18 at 80. I had been writing for some time by then, but Salih’s perceptive assessment of the relationship between East and West, his complex weaving of personal and political lives, and the beauty of his prose redefined fiction for me.

For those who are interested in the introduction I wrote for Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, an abridged version of the essay appears in this weekend’s National.