on Wednesday 18 February, Arabic literature has lost its most significant writer since Naguib Mahfouz. Stefan Weidner pays tribute to an outstanding author : Tayeb Salih, who died this week in London at the age of 80. Before Tayeb Salih stepped onto the seething literary stage that was Beirut in the 1960s, Sudan was literary terra incognita, a white spot in the atlas of poetry. Salih, who recently passed away at the age of 80, was a past master in the art of proving that there is nowhere too small, too remote, or too insignificant for literature; not even the small village on a bend in the river Nile in northern Sudan where Salih was born in 1929, where the steamboat stops once a week, and where the water pump rattles day in day out. In his short stories and novels, this village goes by the name of Wadd Hamid. It is not an exaggeration to say that every reader of Arabic literature is familiar with it.

The opus magnum:-Despite the fact that his literary oeuvre comprised no more than four books, all of which have been published in German by Lenos Verlag, Salih is considered one of the greatest authors ever to come out of both sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world. His novel The Season of Migration to the North, which was published in 1966, is one of the all time top ten greats in modern Arabic literature. For an entire generation of Middle East intellectuals, it is a cult book, the shot that signalled the start of the Arab "generation of 1968".