“The Sudanese author, who had long been pushed as a candidate for the Nobel prize by Sudanese literary groups, was known for his depictions of east-west culture collisions. His 1966 masterpiece The Season of Migration to the North [was] voted one of the 100 best works of fiction in 2002… [and] was declared to be the most important Arabic novel of the 20th Century by the Damascus-based Arab Literary Academy in 2001.”