World Scene: Sudan

Novelist dies at 80

Sudan's official news agency says one of the Arab world's top novelists, Al-Tayeb Saleh, who portrayed characters torn between the cultures of West and East, has died in London after a long but unspecified illness. He was 80.

Saleh, who died yesterday, was born in 1929 in the northern Sudanese town of Marawi but has lived most of his life away from home.