Ian Mc Donald (Guyanese Writer) - Literary Activities

Literary Activities

His love for literature and writing began when he was a schoolboy. His first poems were published in the 1950s and over the years his poems have appeared in a number of West Indian journals, particularly BIM, Kyk-Over-Al, The Caribbean Writer, New Voices, The Trinidad And Tobago Review, Poui, The Caribbean Review of Books and Jamaica Journal as well as in Planet, Outposts, Voices, and other magazines in Britain and America. His poems have appeared in many anthologies of poems of the region, including Caribbean Poetry Now, Voiceprint, The Graham House Review issue on West Indian Poetry, the Archipelago issue of Conjunctions, the Caribbean Poetry issue of the Atlanta Review and the Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry. He was awarded The Caribbean Writer’s Prize for Poetry in 1991 and 2007.

He also writes short stories and his work has appeared in anthologies, most recently in the Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories and the Faber Book of West Indian Stories.

His novel The Humming-Bird Tree was first published by Heinemann in 1969, when it won the Royal Society of Literature Prize for best regional novel. It was re-issued as a paperback in the Heinemann Caribbean Writers series in 1974, and has been widely used as a textbook in schools in the region and abroad. The BBC made a film of The Humming-Bird Tree for broadcast at Christmas 1992, and in the same year Heinemann re-issued the novel in a new edition. In 2006 Macmillan published a new edition of The Humming-Bird Tree.

He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) since 1970.

His one-act play, The Tramping Man, first produced at the Theatre Guild in Guyana in October 1969, has been staged throughout the West Indies and in London. It has been published by UWI’s School of Continuing Studies in a collection of eight Caribbean plays entitled…a time and a season.

In 1975 Faber and Faber published eleven of his poems in their collection Poetry Introduction 3. Selected Poems was published in Georgetown, Guyana, by the Labour Advocate in 1983. His collection of poems Mercy Ward was published by Peterloo Poets in the UK in 1988. A further collection of poems, Essequibo, was published by Peterloo Poets in the UK and Story Line Press in America in 1992. Essequibo won the 1992 Guyana Prize for Poetry. A third collection of poetry, Jaffo the Calypsonian, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 1994. A further collection of poetry, Between Silence and Silence, was published in 2003 and won the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2004.

In 1984, he edited the book AJS at 70 in honour of Guyana’s great man of letters A. J. Seymour’s 70th birthday.

In 1984, he was instrumental in reviving the literary magazine Kyk-Over-Al (magazine), which had first been published in Guyana between 1954 and 1961, and was joint editor, with A. J. Seymour, until Seymour’s death in 1989, after which McDonald continued to edit the magazine with Vanda Radzik. In June 1990, a joint issue of Kyk-Over-Al and BIM was published, edited by John Wickham and Ian McDonald; reviewing it in The Caribbean Writer, Cedric Lindo said: "Perhaps most striking about this joint issue is the ability of Ian McDonald to provide so much material, and very interesting material at that, in 'Across the Editor's Desk.' Seymour has clearly left a good heir in him." The 50th Anniversary issue to Kyk-over-Al, No. 46/47, was published in December 1995. In the Guyana 1997 National Honours List Kyk-Over-Al received the Group Medal of Service for its outstanding contribution to literature.

Since 2009 he has been consulting Editor for the Guyana Classics, a series of Guyanese “Classics” to be republished by the Caribbean Press funded by the government of Guyana.

He was Chairman of Demerara Publishers Limited, which produced and printed 36 books by Guyanese between 1987 and 1992. McDonald helped to edit and wrote the foreword for the first edition of Martin Carter’s definitive Selected Poems published in 1989 by Demerara Publishers in Georgetown, and later in a new edition by the Red Thread Press in 1997.

He co-edited (with Dr. Stewart Brown) The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry in English, published in October 1992.

He helped (with Lloyd Searwar, Laxshmi Kallicharan and Joel Benjamin) compile and edit They Came in Ships, an anthology of Guyanese East Indian Writings, published in 1998 by Peepal Tree Press.

He helped prepare, edited (with Jacqueline de Weever) and wrote an introduction for, The Collected Poems of A. J. Seymour, published in 2000 by the Blue Parrot Press in New York.

With Dr. Stewart Brown he selected and edited Poems by Martin Carter, published by Macmillan in 2006.

He contributed to the book Caribbean Despatches, published by Macmillan in 2006.

His Selected Poems, edited and with an Introduction by Professor Edward Baugh, was published by Macmillan in 2008, in honour of his 75th birthday. This book was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize in 2009.

He is currently compiling an entirely new anthology of Guyanese poetry.

He was a member, with P. J. Patterson and Sir Alister McIntyre, of the panel set up by the West Indies Cricket Board in 2007 to report and make recommendations on the governance of West Indies cricket. This report was submitted to the West Indies Cricket Board in October 2007.

He assisted in the compilation, editing and production of Cricket at Bourda, celebrating the Georgetown Cricket Club, in time for the World Cup, March 2007.

With Dr. Stewart Brown he has compiled an Anthology of West Indian Cricket Writing (2010, Peepal Tree Press).

He was a member of the first Management Committee of the Guyana Prize for Literature in 1987. He was the Regional Chairman (Canada and Caribbean) on the panel of judges for the 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

From its inception in 1980 he has been a Director of the Theatre Company of Guyana which in the period 1980-2001 produced nearly 100 plays, musicals and revenues and promoted the careers of many of Guyana’s leading theatrical talents.

He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Theatre Guild of Guyana.

He is a member of the Management Committee of the Castellani House National Art Collection in Guyana.

Between 1990 and 1995 he was a member of the Guyana Book Foundation, which encourages the wide distribution of books and the establishment of small publishers. He was also a member of the National Archives Advisory Committee.

He received the Wordsworth McAndrew Award 2004 from the Guyana Cultural Association, New York, in 2003.

He was inducted into the Queen's Royal College Hall of Honour in 2004.

He is a member of the Guyana National Nominating Committee for the Sabga Caribbean Awards for Excellence, from 2006.

He is a regular contributor of articles on government, current affairs, problems of the Third World, education, literature, and sport in the newspapers. He has written a weekly column, “Ian on Sunday”, for the Stabroek News since the newspaper started publication in Guyana in 1986. His columns also appear in The Nation in Barbados, The Gleaner in Jamaica and the Trinidad & Tobago Review. He also contributed to Outlet in Antigua. He contributed more than 400 Viewpoints and Sports Views on the radio to these two GBC series. His writings on cricket in particular have gained widespread regional notice.

In 2005 he gave the Inaugural Lecture entitled “Cricket: a Hunger in the West Indian soul” at the London Metropolitan University in the Frank Worrell lecture series.

He gave the address at the Frank Collymore Literary Awards ceremony in Barbados in 2009, entitled “I Shake Hands With You In My Heart”.

In 1986, he received the Guyana National Honour, Golden Arrow of Achievement.

In November 1997 the University of the West Indies, at its St. Augustine Campus, awarded him the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) in recognition of his services to Caribbean sugar, sport and literature.

Dr McDonald is married to Mary Callender and they have two sons: Jamie, aged 27 and Darren, aged 22. He has a son Keith, aged 50, a pilot in Canada, from a previous marriage.