H is for Hawk author Helen Macdonald: ‘I felt like a ghost watching the film of myself’

Helen Macdonald was born in Surrey in 1970. Simple Objects, Macdonald’s first book of poetry, was published in 1992, followed by Shaler’s Fish in 2001 and Falcon in 2006.

Macdonald turned to prose in 2014 with a memoir, H is for Hawk. The book won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, the Costa Book of the Year award was Big Issue’s book of the year in 2014. In 2020, Macdonald published the acclaimed essay collection Vesper Flights.

In their Letter to My Younger Self, Macdonald recalls their inspirational father and how his sudden loss impacted on life, inadvertently setting a path to literary success.

Being a naturalist came from my dad. We had similar brains, I think, quite neurodivergent, we had these little obsessions. He was into aeroplanes, I was into birds, but he taught me to look up, and he taught me to be a curious child, to pay attention to what was going on around me. I was on my own quite a lot. I was quite a loner, and I spent a lot of time wandering around looking for creatures, looking at everything from insects to newts. They were, I guess, my friends. It sounds very odd now, but I was looking for life. I learned the world was full of things that weren’t human, and I just grew to love them. I just thought these things were all really fascinating and beautiful. 

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

I think I learned about people quite late in my life. I know children are generally self-absorbed, but I just feel looking back on it that I was much better at relating to animals than I was people. And I think I might have been quite hurtful to people when I was younger, without really knowing that I was doing it. So I’d say sorry to pretty much everyone I knew back when I was a teenager. I was incredibly selfish back then. 

I know there are people who look back on their childhood selves and see a very different creature there, but I do feel that I haven’t changed much. And partly that’s because my life has been sort of a singular and solitary one. I’m on my own. I don’t have kids or a partner right now. And, you know, it’s quite easy to be in touch with that child, Helen. We even wear the same clothes. I still wear big sweaters and jeans and pea coats. I think I’ve been very much myself my whole life. 

Young Helen would have been very, very excited to know that I’ve flown a whole bunch of different birds of prey that I didn’t even know I would ever see. So back then, there are these huge white Arctic falcons, and they were very rare when I was 16. But they’re quite common now, and I’ve handled a whole bunch of them, so that would have been probably the most exciting thing for that person to know about the grown-up me. I guess they would be impressed by the books and the film, but I don’t think they would have been as impressed by the success of the books as the birds. 

Read more:

• ‘Tragedy is a cruel teacher’: Harlan Coben on how death of his parents made him a better writer
• Leona Lewis: ‘I would tell young Leona, I see your pain and I feel you – but you’ll be OK’
• Jeff Goldblum: ‘The universe is a wondrous, mysterious place – appreciate it’

I felt like a ghost watching the film of myself [H is for Hawk, based on their 2014 memoir], but mostly I was just amazed by how well they captured the relationship between my dad and myself. Like Claire [Foy] and Brendan Gleeson did this incredible job, and you can feel the love between them. That was really moving for me. And also, Claire turned out to be an extraordinarily gifted falconer. These hawks, they’re really hard to handle. And just looking at her on screen and seeing that tense, charged space between her, it just put me back inside my time with Mabel [the hawk]. Like it was a time-travelling machine. It was incredible. 

I’ve had loads of jobs. I’ve worked with booksellers. I worked as a shepherd for a bit. I’ve sold my art. I’ve worked in bookshops. I actually worked in the Gulf states for a bit, breeding falcons for sheiks. Academia was great. I really loved the intellectual community. I was at the University of Cambridge teaching history of science, but it didn’t really suit me for a couple of reasons. One is that I didn’t really fit. It was a posh environment, and I don’t come from a posh background. And I was dealing with such amazingly interesting ideas, but I realised that none of them were going to be leaving the university. No ordinary people were ever going to hear about them. But I’m an ordinary person. I want to write about all this stuff for everyone. So I decided to become a writer, and that’s why I left. 

Read more:

• The growth of rewilding in Britain offers hope for a wilder future in 2025
• Top 5 books about climate grief, chosen by Aerth author Deborah Tomkins
• Top 5 books about birds, chosen by Jasmine Donahaye

It took me about seven years to really, really start to get into it [H is for Hawk]. I kept attempting to write it, but it didn’t quite work. Partly it was because I needed more distance, and partly also because I was too scared to be really honest about how mad I got and I use the word mad advisedly. I was deeply depressed at that point. It’s not a book or a film about someone just being sad, then getting a hawk and being happy. No, not at all. The hawk takes you to the underworld and back. So, yeah, I was a bit shy, and then I just thought, I’ve got to just go for it. So I wrote as honestly as I could. And it took about a year and a half from really starting to write it to finish it. 

When I finished writing the book I actually delayed sending it to my publishers for a bit, because I just thought, no one’s gonna read this book. It’s really weird. I had no clue it was gonna take off like it did. And then it just soared. And, you know, I was kind of numb. I had no real sense that this was actually really happening. It was just so high up in the charts, and it started to win awards, and it was absolutely bewildering. And I look back now and I think there are a couple of things that the book looks at, and one of them is that we need to talk about grief, which we’re very bad at. And it also asks why we love the natural world the way we do – why are we drawn towards it? Why are we drawn towards big, scary animals?  

There’s nothing we can do about ageing. You will become bigger. It’s one of the things that people say about grief. They say you’ll get over it. I really wish I’d never heard anyone say that, because you never get over grief. You just become a bigger person, and a person that’s got to be able to hold that grief within you and make it part of yourself, so it’s bearable. So you become more complicated and bigger and stronger. The thing that you don’t realise when you’re young is that you will lose lots of things. You will just increasingly lose things in your life, like people and the ability to run up a hill very fast, and you’ve got to be OK with the fact that these things will just go. You have to be able to mourn them as they go. And you know, it’s all just a bizarre journey, really. 

If I could have one last conversation with anyone it would be my dad. I don’t think I want to tell him about the extremely weird way that losing him has made my career in a way – that’s a very odd thing. But I just would like to thank him for just being an incredibly decent, wonderful dad and man. I never got to really thank him for that in his life.

My mum called to tell me he had died. He had a heart attack. He was out taking photographs for the newspaper and just collapsed in the street. And it was very much a surprise – he was 67; it’s not old. We went to the tiny flat in London where he stayed during the week, and he still had a half-drunk glass of Coca-Cola on the table. No one knew he was even… that it was going to happen. I wish I could have said goodbye to him. 

If I could relive one day I’d pick a day when I was about 10, when Mum and Dad and me and my baby brother went for a walk down a bit of disused canal near Newbury called the Kennett Avon canal. It was all really overgrown then, and it was a really thundery day. There were cuckoos calling and everything was just wet and green and very loud with birdsong. And I heard this incredible noise coming from the bush right by the path. I’d never heard anything like it. It was a birdsong, but it was so rich and kind of like bubbling and weird. I was really into birds but didn’t know what it was. And I looked down, and I saw hopping around on the ground, this bird like a robin, but it was brown all over, with a red tail. And I realised, to my astonishment, as it opened its feet, that it was a nightingale. It was just this incredible sound. And, you know, as a 10-year-old, I wasn’t that emotional really, but I remember just crying. I remember thinking with every fibre of my body, oh, this is what heaven is like. 

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald is published by Vintage (£10.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Change a vendor’s life this winter.

Buy from your local Big Issue vendor every week – and always take the magazine. It’s how vendors earn with dignity and how we fund our work to end poverty.

You can also support online with a vendor support kit or a magazine subscription. Thank you for standing with Big Issue vendors.