Ian McDonald, who has died aged 93, wrote only one novel, but it is considered a classic of Caribbean literature. The Humming-Bird Tree (1969), set in Trinidad in the late 1940s, tells the story of Alan, a young white boy, as he falls into friendship with his family’s yard-boy, Kaiser, who is of Indian extraction, and in love with Kaiser’s younger sister, Jaillin, who is also employed by Alan’s wealthy parents.

While Alan and Jaillin skirt around each other, trying to come to terms with the confusing feelings of their mutual attraction and the disapproval of Alan’s mother and father, wider emotional turmoil is at play in Trinidad, where the masses are beginning to throw off the yoke of British rule.

Alan’s affection for Jaillin is mirrored in unapproved visits to her village, which he finds a vibrant though occasionally distasteful contrast to the stiff atmosphere of his home life. Eventually, when he and Jaillin are found together on an innocent moonlit tryst, their relationship is brought to a forceful end.

It is a gently heartbreaking tale about racial boundaries, and a haunting evocation of postwar Trinidad in all its beauty and ugliness, emerging into a new era with the prospect of independence on the horizon.

The book’s sensitive descriptions of time and place also point to the fact that McDonald was more a poet than an author, featured in numerous anthologies and with eight collections to his name.

In both prose and poetry, he displayed an ability to celebrate the sensuous joy of Caribbean life in all its complexity, acknowledging the wonder of its dazzling natural world and colourful human relations without skirting over the darker, more brutal side of both.

Above all he never failed to show compassion for those he was observing, revealing what the Jamaican poet Ann-Margaret Lim identified as his “caring heart”, something he shared with Caribbean contemporaries such as Mervyn Morris, Eddie Baugh and Derek Walcott. Baugh described McDonald’s poetry as “irradiated by his celebration of life, his gratitude for happy days and for earth’s bounty of joy”.

The eldest of six children, McDonald was born in St Augustine in Trinidad, where his father, John, worked as an agricultural director for a local export business and his mother, Thelma (nee Seheult), was a housewife. At Queen’s Royal college in Port of Spain he shone academically and as an outstanding tennis player. Travelling in 1951 to the UK to study history at Cambridge University, he competed for several years running at the Wimbledon singles championships, captained the university tennis team and played for West Indies in their first ever Davis Cup match in 1953.

After leaving Cambridge in 1955 he returned to the Caribbean to take up an administrative post in British Guiana (now Guyana) with the Booker group, owner of a series of huge sugar estates. By that time the company was becoming more enlightened and was trying to make itself into a business with an unusual commitment to looking after its workers – something that chimed with McDonald’s humane, liberal approach.

Although he continued for a while with his tennis – his last appearance at Wimbledon was in 1959, and he played for the West Indies Davis Cup team into the 1960s – he shifted his focus towards work and immersed himself in Guyana’s culture. He eventually came to consider himself “Trinidadian by birth, Guyanese by adoption”.

A parallel writing career began with the publication in 1955 of a first poem, Jaffo the Calypsonian, followed by others, such as The Stick-Fighters, The Cane-Cutter and The Seine-Pullers, that celebrated the artful strength of ordinary folk and appeared in Caribbean literary magazines such as Bim, Poui and Kyk-Over-Al.

There were also short stories and a one-act play, The Tramping Man, that addressed the struggles of postcolonial life and was first performed by the Theatre Guild of Guyana in 1969. In the same year The Humming-Bird Tree won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje prize (then known as the Winifred Holtby memorial prize) and became a set text in schools across the Caribbean.

The novel’s success created greater interest in McDonald’s poetry, and his first collection appeared in Guyana. In 1975 Faber & Faber included 11 of his poems in the third edition of its Poetry Introduction series, and collections of his work followed at regular intervals, including Essequibo (poems about wayfarers he met in the hinterland of the Essequibo river) in 1992 and Jaffo the Calypsonian in 1994.

In 1992 The Humming-Bird Tree was made into a quietly captivating film directed by Noella Smith, featuring Tom Beasley as Alan and Desha Penco as Jaillin, and broadcast as part of the BBC Screen One series.

There were more poetry collections – including Mercy Ward (1998, about his visits to dying patients in a Guyanese hospital), Between Silence and Silence (2003) and The Comfort of All Things (2012). McDonald also edited or co-edited publications including the Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry in English (1992) and two anthologies of West Indian writing, They Came in Ships (1998) and This Bowling Was Superfine (2009). In 2014 a selection of his prose from a weekly newspaper column in the Stabroek News was published as A Love of Poetry, followed five years later by essays on sport, An Abounding Joy.

McDonald’s career in the sugar industry survived Guyana’s many social and political upheavals: when Bookers was taken over by GuySuCo under a nationalisation programme in 1976, he continued as an administrative director, rising to be director of marketing and administration. He left to become chief executive of the Sugar Association of the Caribbean from 1999 until retirement in 2007. Afterwards he was a member of a panel set up by the West Indies Cricket Board to make recommendations on the governance of regional cricket.

New and Collected Poems (2018) included new verse, written in his 80s. Rather more serene than his earlier material, these newer poems continued to explore his interest in the ephemeral nature of life, though perhaps with greater urgency than before. In the opening poem to Mercy Ward, he had reflected that death comes “sudden/quick as light/skin shine/then bone white”.

McDonald is survived by his second wife, Mary (nee Callender), whom he married in 1983, their two children, Jamie and Darren, and a son, Keith, from his first marriage to Myrna Foster, which ended in divorce.

• Ian Archie McDonald, poet and author, born 18 April 1933; died 24 July 2026