![]() ![]() Steve Paulson: You were very close to your father, who died suddenly from a heart attack. You can subscribe to the TTBOOK podcast here. Our conversation aired on Public Radio International’s To the Best of Our Knowledge. I talked with Macdonald about falconry, wildness, and the dangers of cutting yourself off from the human world. Part of the drama of this story is to see how she pulls herself back from the brink once she’s become “more hawk than human.” A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary.” The goshawk is a feral creature who leads Macdonald into the depths of her own inner wildness. “My head jumps sideways,” she writes of the first time she sees her hawk. ![]() A dazzling writer, Macdonald has an almost incantatory power to evoke wonder. H is for Hawk won Britain’s Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction, and it’s now landed on bestseller lists in America. It’s a hybrid of a book - a blend of nature writing and memoir, as well as a mini-biography of another hawk enthusiast, the fantasy writer T.H. White. We can now add Helen Macdonald’s name to England’s celebrated tradition of nature writers - except that she would probably bristle at being labeled a “nature writer.” In her new book H is for Hawk, Macdonald tells the story of the goshawk she acquires and trains to help her cope with the grief from her father’s death. ![]()
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