We should be meeting on some blasted heath, I can’t help thinking, as Helen Macdonald and I greet each other. After all, her book H is for Hawk is a visceral depiction of the grief and depression she fell into after the sudden death of her father in 2007, and her salvation through falconry. Instead, we’re in a bare, antiseptic meeting room at the communications company that runs the Samuel Johnson prize. Urbanity doesn’t seem right. “This isn’t my natural habitat,” says Macdonald.
H is for Hawk, which has just won the £20,000 prize, describes the year Macdonald spent training a goshawk following the death of her father, a much-admired Fleet Street photographer. She writes lyrically about subsuming her grief in the relationship with the bird and trying to be like her: “solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life”. As she writes, “I was turning into a hawk.”
I may have read too much into this line, because I see signs of hawkishness everywhere in Macdonald’s behaviour: the tugging and twining of her long black hair, the scratching of her arm, the quick, urgent movements, the intensity of her eyes. Much of it may, though, be down to gallons of early-morning coffee, and the fact she was unable to sleep after winning the prize, so had whiled away the time playing computer games.
Her book is the first memoir to win the prize. I stupidly suggest that in the past the genre has perhaps been dismissed for being too easy and self-indulgent. This probably compounds her disappointment that I’m not Stephen Moss the nature-writer, who actually knows about birds. But she forgives me and explains that the form gave her the flexibility to bring different threads together. “While the backbone of the book is a memoir about that year when I lost my father and trained a hawk,” she says, “there are also other things tangled up in that story which are not memoir. There is the shadow biography of TH White, and a lot of nature-writing, too. I was trying to let these different genres speak to each other.”
Labour MP Alan Johnson, one of the judges, said that marrying such different types of material could have gone horribly wrong, but she brings them together expertly. In one highly compressed volume, we have the working through of the most desperate grief, a potted history of falconry, a rumination on nature, and an essay on the life of White, a writer best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels The Once and Future King. White had – also at a time of great personal suffering in the 1930s – secluded himself away and sought to train a goshawk. The book he wrote, The Goshawk, which Macdonald had known since she was a child, becomes a parallel text within her book.
The Guardian called H is for Hawk a “misery memoir” in the news piece about her win. Commenters immediately latched on to this as a patronising term for so complex a book, but it’s not a phrase she dismisses out of hand. “That’s what books about grief are,” she says. “But it is an odd phrase and has this connotation of navel-gazing.”
What lifts her book above such easy categorisation is that she waited five years before writing it. She spent 2007 grieving and training the hawk, while the rest of her life fell apart – her short-term contract as an academic in the history and philosophy of science department at Cambridge University was ending and she was running out of cash. But she didn’t start writing the book until 2012. “I needed that time to process it,” she says. “Some memoirs about grief have a power because they’re written inside that time. And some, like mine, are written afterwards, looking back.”
Once she started writing, she was surprised how quickly the memories of that desperate year – in which she eventually sought treatment for her depression – surged back. “Sudden bereavement does something strange to your powers of recall. I had incredibly vivid visual and emotional memories of that year. It all seemed very clear to me.” As she wrote, she says, it felt as if she was diving underwater to re-enter that year of suffering, thankfully resurfacing a few hours later.
“When I was writing, I didn’t think the book had any therapeutic value,” she says. “But when I’d finished, there was a great sense that something was done, and it was a goodbye to my father and to that time. The book traces a time from that shock of the early loss to a point when I realised that the grief had turned into love. There’s that lovely line – ‘Grief is just love with nowhere to go’ – and the book traces that course of loss to acceptance.”
Emotion recollected in tranquillity: the key to much good writing, I suggest.She balks at comparing herself to Wordsworth, but says she feels kinship not just with his approach to writing but with his relationship to nature. “The natural world is this wellspring of extraordinary wonderment to me – the sense that the world is full of non-human minds and non-human lives. Living with that hawk for the time I did was a window into that sense of difference, which is something to treasure.”
On her Twitter feed, 44-year-old Macdonald styles herself as “writer-naturalist-historian-falconer”, which is a useful guide to her priorities. She retains a link with Cambridge, where she studied English and later embarked on a PhD, but it sounds fairly minimal, and she now writes for a living. The £20,000 buys her time before she begins her next book. She hasn’t decided on a subject yet, but fiction appeals. You feel that, like White, she could commute easily between fiction and non-fiction. She published poetry in her 20s, produced a cultural history of falconry a decade ago, and sees herself as someone who can act as a bridge between academia and the general reader. Her references to 17th-century disquisitions on falconry sit surprisingly easily in her memoir.
She must have been a terrifyingly precocious child – growing up in her Camberley eyrie, obsessed by birds of prey from the age of eight. She says she was bullied at school because she was solitary and fascinated by falconry. After finishing her undergraduate degree, she spent three years at a breeding centre for falcons in Abu Dhabi; this a book which, in every sense, has been lived. “I met lots of Bedouin falconers,” she says. “One explained that God chooses falconers before birth. He thought it hilarious that God had made a woman with the falconry bug.”
