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Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator and naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, and three collections of poetry, including Shaler's Fish. Macdonald was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a professional falconer, and has assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia. She now writes for the New York Times Magazine.
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Julie Goldberg, on behalf of the Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Helen Macdonal about her book H Is for Hawk(Grove Press), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2015 NBCC Awards.
Julie Goldberg: Part of the magic of H is for Hawk is how alive your goshawk Mabel becomes—in her body and moods, in her power and playfulness. What was it like to write about her, years later, in such detail?
Helen Macdonald: Writing about her was much easier than writing about my father's death, my family, or myself! I can recall my time with her that year with crystalline clarity. Grief does strange things to the workings of memory. Back then I wanted to assume her rapturous, wordless, hawkish mind, and I tried, as I wrote, to match my style to that imagined subjectivity. Short sentences to capture her world as a series of fleeting, present moments; lyrical passages to suggest the strangeness of the landscape through the eyes of a hawk. I edited the hell out of most of the prose, but the sections about the hawk — what she was like, how she flew and hunted — they were written fast and hardly edited at all. I'm very sad to say ...
David Almond, in his own words:
I was born in Newcastle and I grew up in a big Catholic family in
Felling-on-Tyne. I had four sisters and a brother and lots of relatives in the
streets nearby. My dad had been in Burma ...
(more)
If you enjoyed:
H Is for Hawk
Try:
My Dad's A Birdman
by David Almond
Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England on January 19, 1946. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964 and at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he graduated in modern languages (with honors) in ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
H Is for Hawk
Try:
Levels of Life
by Julian Barnes
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