Helen Macdonald (born 1970) is an English writer, naturalist, and an Affiliated Research Scholar at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

Department of History and Philosophy of Science. She is best known as the author of ''

H is for Hawk ''H is for Hawk'' is a 2014 memoir by British author Helen Macdonald. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year award, among other honours. Content ''H is for Hawk'' tells Macdonald's story of the year she spent training a n ...

'', which won the 2014

Samuel Johnson Prize The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, is an annual British book prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award. With its ...

and Costa Book Award.Anita Singh
H is for Hawk wins Costa Book of the Year award
, The Telegraph, 27 January 2015. In 2016, it also won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France.

Early life

Macdonald was born in 1970, the child of ''

Daily Mirror The ''Daily Mirror'' is a British national daily tabloid. Founded in 1903, it is owned by parent company Reach plc. From 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the title on its masthead was simply ''The Mirror''. It had an average daily print c ...

'' photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, and grew up in Surrey. Writing about her childhood for ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' in 2018, Macdonald said,

"I grew up in Camberley, a Victorian town on the A30 in Surrey. It was made of pine forests, golf courses, elderly army officers with parade ground voices, Conservative clubs and tea dances. In 1975 my parents had bought a little white house in Tekels Park, a private estate near the town centre. It was owned by the
Theosophical Society The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, is a worldwide body with the aim to advance the ideas of Theosophy in continuation of previous Theosophists, especially the Greek and Alexandrian Neo-Platonic philosophers dating back to 3rd century CE ...
. My parents were journalists and knew nothing of theosophy, but they loved the Park, and I did too. No place has so indelibly shaped my writing life".

Macdonald went on to study English at Cambridge University. They were subsequently a Research Fellow at

Jesus College, Cambridge Jesus College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college's full name is The College of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist and the glorious Virgin Saint Radegund, near Cambridge. Its common name comes fr ...

from 2004 to 2007, and currently is an Affiliated Research Scholar at the

Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge The Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), of the University of Cambridge is the largest department of history and philosophy of science in the United Kingdom. A majority of its submissions received maximum ratings of 4* and 3* i ...

Career

Macdonald has written and narrated several radio programmes, and appeared on television in the BBC Four documentary series, '' Birds Britannia'', in 2010. Their books include ''Shaler's Fish'' (2001), ''Falcon'' (2006), ''

'' (2014), and ''Vesper Flights'' (2020). Macdonald received critical acclaim for ''H is for Hawk'', including the 2014

for non-fiction and the Costa Book Award. The book—which also became a '' Sunday Times'' best-seller—describes the year Macdonald spent after the death of her father training a Northern goshawk named Mabel, and includes biographical material about the naturalist and writer T. H. White.Cambridge News
INTERVIEW: Cambridge author Helen Macdonald on grief, goshawks, and her best-selling book, H is for Hawk
, Cambridge News, 7 September 2014. Macdonald also helped make the film "10 X Murmuration" with filmmaker Sarah Wood as part of a 2015 exhibition at the

Brighton Festival Brighton Festival is a large, annual, curated multi-arts festival in England. It includes music, theatre, dance, circus, art, film, literature, debate, outdoor and family events, and takes place in venues in the city of Brighton and Hove in Engla ...

.Helen Macdonald
Spies in the sky: Helen Macdonald on how birds reflect our national anxieties
, The Guardian, 12 May 2015. In ''H is for Hawk: A New Chapter'', part of BBC's ''

Natural World ''Natural World'' is a strand of British wildlife documentary programmes broadcast on BBC Two and BBC Two HD and regarded by the BBC as its flagship natural history series. It is the longest-running documentary in its genre on British televis ...

'' series in 2017, she trained a new goshawk chick. Macdonald presented the BBC Four documentary, ''The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway'', in 2020. That same year saw the publication of their fourth book, ''Vesper Flights'', a collection of essays about "the human relationship to the natural world".

Personal life

Macdonald resides in

Hawkedon Hawkedon is a village and civil parish in the West Suffolk district of Suffolk in eastern England. Located around south-south-west of Bury St Edmunds, the parish also contains the hamlet of Thurston End, and in 2005 had a population of 120. Th ...

, Suffolk. They previously resided with a parrot, Birdoole, who died in 2021. Macdonald's goshawk, Mabel, died in 2014. Macdonald is

non-binary Non-binary and genderqueer are umbrella terms for gender identities that are not solely male or femaleidentities that are outside the gender binary. Non-binary identities fall under the transgender umbrella, since non-binary people typically ...

and uses She/They pronouns.

Bibliography

* * * * * *

Poetry

;Collections *

References

External links

Helen Macdonald - May 2015 ABC interview with Richard Fidler (audio)

Helen Macdonald's blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Macdonald, Helen 1970 births Living people Women naturalists English naturalists English nature writers People from Chelmsford English women journalists Fellows of Jesus College, Cambridge Women science writers 21st-century English women writers New Statesman people