Ian McDonald (writer)

Ian McDonald (born 1933) is a poet, novelist, and sugar industry advocate. He was born in St. Augustine, Trinidad, in 1933, and educated at Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain and Cambridge University, where he was a tennis champion and captained the university team. In 1955 he moved to British Guiana (later Guyana) to work with the sugar firm Booker's. He describes himself as "Antiguan by ancestry, Trinidadian by birth, Guyanese by adoption and West Indian by conviction".

Literary career

McDonald's novel "The Humming-Bird Tree" was published in 1969; like "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys and "Christopher" by Geoffrey Drayton, it explores the experience of a white West Indian growing up in the years before the British West Indian territories moved towards independence in the 1950s and 60s. The novel was filmed by the BBC in 1992.

McDonald has also published four collections of poems: "Mercy Ward" (1988), "Essequibo" (1992, winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature), "Jaffo the Calypsonian" (1994), and "Between Silence and Silence" (2003, winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature). His poems have been widely anthologised. He has also written a play, "The Tramping Man".

In 1984 he helped A.J. Seymour revive the literary magazine "Kyk-Over-Al", serving as co-editor until Seymour's death in 1989, and editor thereafter. McDonald was co-editor (with Jacqueline de Weever) of Seymour's "Collected Poems", published in 2000.

He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has served as a judge for the Guyana Prize for Literature and other Caribbean writing awards. He has worked in various official and unofficial roles with many Guyanese cultural institutions over the years. In 1997 he was given an honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of the West Indies.

ugar industry career

McDonald has worked in the Caribbean sugar industry since 1955. He began at the British-owned firm Booker's, which was nationalised in the 1970s, becoming the Guyana Sugar Corporation (Guysuco); he rose to the position of administrative director before his retirement. He is now CEO of the Sugar Association of the Caribbean, based in Guyana, an organisation representing sugar growers and producers. McDonald has been a leading figure in efforts by ACP sugar interests to preserve preferential tariffs for the importation of sugar from former European colonies into the European Union.