My goshawk Mabel was too, after my father died. These are hawks as tutelary spirits for the lost or dispossessed. Both Casper’s kestrel and TH White’s goshawk are the consorts of unhappy souls, as is Richie Tenenbaum’s saker falcon, Mordecai, in The Royal Tenenbaums. But the role of birds of prey in recent literature and film is also revealing. Maybe part of my love for them is caught up in that history. In Barry Hines’ novel A Kestrel for a Knave, Billy Casper says that when they fly “everything seems to go dead quiet” – which gets across how hawks can instill something like a dim, religious awe, and have done for thousands of years across myriad cultures. Why?īecause I thought they were the most perfect, beautiful things the world had ever made. You’ve loved birds of prey since you were a child. Melissa Harrison caught up with Helen to find out how H Is For Hawk came to be. White’s heartbreaking and misguided battle with his own hawk, which he described in his lesser-known book The Goshawk (1951). It’s also an account of The Sword In The Stone author T.H. Interleaving memoir, nature writing and biography, H Is For Hawk is a uniquely luminous account of Cambridge historian and falconer Helen Macdonald’s training of a goshawk, undertaken in the wake of her father’s sudden death. H is for Hawk: An interview with Helen Macdonald
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