Category — obituaries

Evolutionary biologist Nicholas Hughes committed suicide last Monday in Alaska.  Hughes, the son of poet Ted Hughes and author Sylvia Plath, was 47.

Forty-six years ago, the scientist’s mother famously committed suicide by sticking her head in an oven, and a few short years later his stepmother did the same.  But The Guardian has a good take on why Hughes’ death shouldn’t be romanticized, and how looking at this as a family curse is offensive to the depressed and to Plath fans.

Hughes taught at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks in the School of Fisheries and Ocean Science.  He resigned from teaching several years ago but stayed on as a researcher, studying salmon in Alaska and New Zealand.

Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih died last Wednesday at the age of 80. His 1966 novel Season Of Migration to the North, about a Sudanese man in London, was voted the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century by the Arab Literary Academy. Salih wrote three later novels, as well as a collection of short stories.