H is for Hawk

H is for Hawk tells Macdonald's story of the year she spent training a northern goshawk in the wake of her father's death. Her father, Alisdair Macdonald, was a respected photojournalist who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2007. Having been a falconer for many years, she purchased a young goshawk to help her through the grieving process.

The book reached The Sunday Times best-seller list within two weeks of being published in July 2014.[1]

In an interview with The Guardian, Macdonald said, "While the backbone of the book is a memoir about that year when I lost my father and trained a hawk, 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."[2] White was the author of The Goshawk (1951), an account of his own attempt to train a goshawk.[3]

Judges of the Samuel Johnson Prize specifically highlighted that marriage of genres as one of the reasons for selecting H is for Hawk as the winner.[2]

An extract of this book is also part of the anthology of Edexcel English Language IGCSE in the new specification.

In "H is for Hawk: A New Chapter", part of BBC's Natural World series in 2017, she trained a new goshawk chick.[4]

• 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize, winner[5]
• 2014 Costa Book of the Year, winner.[6]
• 2014 Duff Cooper Prize, shortlist.[7]
• 2015 Thwaites Wainwright Prize, longlist.[7]
• 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, shortlist.[8]
• 2016 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, winner[9]

• Falconry training and technique