She previously attended a conference on birds of prey in Johannesburg some 15 years ago and spent some time bird-spotting in the Kruger National Park. It is the author’s second visit to South Africa. Unsurprisingly MacDonald’s academic work and interest in the relationship between people and animals also ended up in the book. “I think we all go through dark times but we don’t often get the chance to talk about it. “When my dad died it was a raw time, so I needed to put some distance between it and what had happened. “But it took me a long time to write, about five years,” she said.

“A lot of women have since spoken to me about being stuck at home with a small baby and how it seemed to be similar to what I had gone through.”Īs Macdonald - an affiliated research scholar at the University of Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science - worked through her grief she began to realise that what she was experiencing would make a good story. My world shrunk to just a space with the hawk. “As the days passed and I put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, my humanity was burning away. The hawk’s apprehension becomes your own. Eventually you don’t see the hawk’s body language at all. “To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so gain the ability to predict what it will do next. But it turned out to be a really good escape from my grief. “It was really hard to do,” admits the author, who recently visited Cape Town and Johannesburg as part of a book tour to promote H is for Hawk. “Working with birds is something I have done all my life but I didn’t want to train a Goshawk because they have a reputation for being really highly strung.

That journey lies at the heart of her book, H is for Hawk, winner of the 2014 Costa Book of the Year award and the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Knocked sideways by grief, she bought Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and took her home to Cambridge, filled the freezer with hawk food and embarked on the long business of trying to train this wildest of animals. White’s classic, The Goshawk, which describes his struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest.īut until the death of her father, Alisdair Macdonald, a respected photojournalist, who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2007, she never imagined that she would train a Goshawk of her own. Helen MacDonald, author of H is for Hawk.ĪS a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the terminology and read all the classic books, including T.

Helen macdonald cambridge