McDonald was born in 1960, in Manchester, to a Scottish father and Irish mother, but moved to Belfast when he was five, and has lived there ever since. He therefore lived through the whole of the 'Troubles' (1968-99), and his sensibility has been permanently shaped by coming to understand Northern Ireland as a post-colonial (and so, in his view, de facto 'Third World') society imposed on an older culture. He became a fan of SF from childhood TV, began writing when he was 9, sold his first story to a local Belfast magazine when he was 22, and in 1987 became a full-time writer. He has also worked in TV consultancy within Northern Ireland, contributing scripts to the Northern Irish Sesame Workshop production Sesame Tree.

As his many nominations and awards show, McDonald has built a considerable career and is increasingly widely admired both in developed nations and in the developing nations whose cultures often feature in his work. His 1990s 'Chaga Saga' is particularly notable for its analysis of the AIDS crisis in Africa, and his most recent works, River of Gods (2004), set in mid-twenty-first-century India, and Brasyl (2007), collocating the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries in Lusophone South America, extend McDonald's powerful attention to SF as a discourse intimate with colonialism.

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