Helen Macdonald books

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Helen Macdonald is a British writer, naturalist, and affiliate at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her work sits at the intersection of nature writing, memoir, and cultural history.

Her best-known book, H is for Hawk (2014), describes her experience training a goshawk in the months after her father’s sudden death. The memoir won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, and became an international bestseller. Vesper Flights (2020) collects essays on the natural world, from migrating swifts to mushroom hunting to the lives of city birds.

As a poet, Macdonald published two collections — Simple Objects (1993) and Shaler’s Fish (2002) — before turning primarily to prose. She has also contributed to the Reaktion Books Animal series, writing the volume on falcons. Her novel Prophet appeared in 2023.