Ad Dabbah is a village in Makkah Province, in western Saudi Arabia.

Tayeb Salih (Arabic: الطيب صالح‎) (1929 – 18 February 2009) was a Sudanese writer.

Born in Karmakol, near the village of Al Dabbah in the Northern Province of Sudan, he studied at the University of Khartoum before leaving for the University of London in England. Coming from a background of small farmers and religious teachers, his original intention was to work in agriculture. However, excluding a brief spell as a schoolmaster before coming to England, his working life was in broadcasting.

For more than ten years, Salih wrote a weekly column for the London-based Arabic language newspaper al Majalla in which he explored various literary themes. He worked for the BBC's Arabic Service and later became director general of the Ministry of Information in Doha, Qatar. He spent the last 10 years of his working career with UNESCO in Paris, where he held various posts and was UNESCO's representative in the Gulf States.

Salih achieved immediate acclaim when his novel Season of Migration to the North was first published in Beirut in 1966. In 2001, the book was declared “the most important Arabic novel of the 20th century” by the Arab Literary Academy. His works have been translated from Arabic into more than 20 languages.