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Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Sugar, sport and storytelling

by

20130901

My name is Ian Mc­Don­ald and I wrote the nov­el The Hum­ming­bird Tree.It amazes me that, 40 years af­ter pub­li­ca­tion and ba­si­cal­ly 50 years af­ter it was writ­ten, peo­ple still know about The Hum­ming­bird Tree.I am Trinida­di­an by birth, An­tiguan by an­ces­try, Guyanese by adop­tion and West In­di­an by con­vic­tion.I've seen com­ments that Naipaul was rather an anony­mous fig­ure at Queen's Roy­al Col­lege but he was very well known! He would hold forth from a nar­row balustrade up­stairs–the fall would have killed him–and he would get very worked up. I've of­ten thought, if he had fall­en, the great Naipaul would have dis­ap­peared in the sixth form.When I went to Cam­bridge, this great uni­ver­si­ty, 800 years of ed­u­ca­tion, I thought I would be over­awed. I found I was bet­ter-ed­u­cat­ed than 80 per cent of the peo­ple. That came from Queen's Roy­al Col­lege.


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