My friend Nigel Cross, who has died aged 66, coolly straddled the worlds of literature and international development.

Born in Cambridge to Barry Cross, a university academic who became president of Corpus Christi College, and his wife, Audrey (nee Crow), Nigel was educated at Clifton college, Bristol, and Sussex University, where he studied English.

In 1974, following graduation, he was working in a bar on Exmoor when he met Victor Bonham-Carter, the president of the Exmoor Society and secretary of the Royal Literary Fund (RLF). Victor recognised Nigel’s bookish aspirations and found him a job as the fund’s archivist, a post he held until 1984. With access to its papers of struggling authors, he wrote The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street, published in 1985. He also produced combative book reviews for publications including the Spectator and the New Statesman.

In 1975, he began a PhD in literary history at University College London, where he met his first wife, Caroline Dakers, now a professor of cultural history at Central Saint Martins in London. The couple married in 1980 and had two daughters, Harriet and Madeline.

Restless in the literary world, Nigel began travelling abroad in the late 1970s. I met him during this time, and – hoping to get involved in international development – he and I set up the short-lived Arid Lands Research Agency in response to the Sahelian drought of the 70s.

In 1983 Nigel became director of SOS Sahel in London, which runs development programmes in sub-Saharan Africa. Witty, self-effacing and assured, he used his skills as a communicator to coax money from donors and form a successful alliance of similar organisations in other countries, which now operates as SOS Sahel International.

In 1994 he moved to the Panos Institute (now the Panos Network), which promotes media and communication in the developing world. His achievements there led to him being hired in 1999 to head the International Institute for Environment and Development.

However he had bouts of depression for which, in his own words, he “sought no treatment, preferring to drink and read poetry”. His health and relationships suffered as a result of his alcoholism, which contributed to his divorce in 2010 and later to his death.

Professionally, he yearned for a return to the field. After a short interlude as a professorial fellow at Soas University of London he joined the Dutch development agency SNV in 2008 as its director in South Sudan – a challenging period for that country as it neared independence.

There he met a Ugandan colleague, Josephine Namusisi, whom he married in 2014. Latterly he lived between his book-strewn house in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and hers in Kampala.

He is survived by Josephine, Harriet and Madeline.