David Santos Donaldson

David Santos Donaldson is a Bahamian-raised novelist whose work joins literary history, performance, race, and queer identity. Greenland, his debut novel, follows aspiring writer Kip Starling as he struggles to complete a book about the relationship between E. M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl. The narrative folds Kip's contemporary crisis into the historical material he is trying to inhabit, creating a novel within a novel that tests authorship, intimacy, and the limits of identification. Amistad published Greenland in 2022. It was recognized by the Carnegie Medal program and the Publishing Triangle, among other honors. Donaldson grew up in Nassau and has lived in India, Spain, and the United States. He studied at Wesleyan University and trained as an actor in the Drama Division of the Juilliard School, experience that helps explain the book's attention to voice and role. Greenland established him as a writer willing to combine archival imagination with formally adventurous, emotionally demanding fiction.