Salih's writing draws important inspiration from his youth in a Sudanese village; life that is centered on rural people and their complex relationships. "At various levels and with varying degrees of psychoanalytic emphasis, he deals with themes of reality and illusion, the
cultural dissonance between the West and the exotic Orient, the harmony and conflict of brotherhood, and the individual's responsibility to find a fusion between his or her contradictions." Furthermore, the motifs of his books are derived from his religious experience as a
Muslim in 20th-century Sudan, both pre- and post-colonial. In 1966, Salih published his novel
Mawsim al-Hijrah ilâ al-Shimâl (Season of Migration to the North), for which he is best known. It was first published in the Beirut journal
Hiwâr. The main concern of the novel is with the impact of
British colonialism and European modernity on rural African societies in general, and on Sudanese culture and identity in particular. His novel reflects the conflicts of modern Sudan and depicts the brutal history of
European colonialism as shaping the reality of contemporary Sudanese society.
Season of Migration to the North is a story told to an unspecified audience by the unnamed narrator, a “traveled man” and an African who has returned after having spent years abroad. He returns to his Sudanese village of Wad Hamid on the
Nile in the 1950s after having written a
PhD thesis on ‘the life of an obscure English poet’. Mustafa Sa'eed, the main protagonist of the novel, is a child of British colonialism, and a fruit of colonial education. In his essay "The New Novel in Sudan", published in
Banipal magazine's issue of spring 1966 on
Sudanese Literature today, Sudanese writer Emad Blake remarked that Salih "confronted the crucial issues of his time, such as the clash of Eastern and Western civilizations, as well as boldly employing sex and a style of writing we might term the 'impossible easy'." The Damascus-based Arab Literary Academy named it one of the best novels in Arabic of the twentieth century. Upon its publication, it was banned in Salih's native Sudan for several years, because of its partly sexual content and despite the fact that it won him prominence and international fame. ''Urs' al-Zayn'' (published in English as
The Wedding of Zein) is a novella, published in 1966, centering on the unlikely nuptials of the town eccentric Zein. Tall and odd-looking, with just two teeth in his mouth, Zein has made a reputation for himself as the man who falls in love over and over with girls who promptly marry other men, – to the point where mothers seek him out in hopes that he will draw the eye of available suitors to their eligible daughters. "The Wedding of Zein" was made into a drama in
Libya and won
Kuwaiti filmmaker Khalid Siddiq an award at the
Cannes Film Festival in the late 1970s. In his reflections on Salih's literary style, his translator
Denys Johnson-Davies wrote that Salih "exploited to the full the richness of the literary language in his narrative and uses the vivid local dialect for his dialog. [...] Tayeb Salih’s work shows his wide reading in the byways of Arabic literature, including poetry, which has helped to fashion a style which is direct and fluent, a style which an Arab critic has described as being closer to dramatic writing than that of the novel." == Awards in honour of Tayeb Salih ==