Author Macdonald: Playing catch with 'death in a feathered jacket'

(This story filed on Jan 27, 2015 corrects paragraph 12 to say 1930s, not 1940s)

[January 28, 2015]  By Hugh Lawson

LONDON (Reuters) - To help cope with her grief after her father's sudden death, falconer and nature writer Helen Macdonald, who on Tuesday won the Costa book prize, locked herself in the house with a large, untrained bird of prey.

A peculiar choice, perhaps, but for Macdonald the process of training her goshawk was a form of distraction and a way of putting her world back together.

"I saw in the hawk all the things I wanted to be. They don't experience grief, they don't have attachments like we do, they're very solitary," she said in a telephone interview before the Costa prize winner was announced.

"There's a lot of unspoken rage tied up when you lose a very loved parent, and I could kind of express that through the hawk," she said.

It was also the beginning of a long journey that would culminate in the publication of "H Is For Hawk", a powerful memoir that won Macdonald the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction last November, and now the 2014 Costa Book Award.

The book emerged from the journals Macdonald kept as she worked with her goshawk, whom she named Mabel from the Latin for "loveable".

"It very slowly dawned on me that there was a story here that was bigger than just me and a hawk. It was about life and death and making sense of it all, and about our relationship to nature," she said.

She was also looking for companionship, not something you might expect from "30 ounces of death in a feathered jacket", as she describes Mabel in her book, but which she nevertheless finds, sitting on the living room floor and tossing up pieces of crumpled paper for Mabel to catch in her beak.

"I've recently discovered that quite a lot of male goshawkers play with their hawks - they just don't let on about it," she said, laughing out loud.

Macdonald fell in love with falconry when she was a young girl, and describes it as "a fascinating piece of human-animal interaction".

"It's an incredibly ancient thing. This partnership has been going on for literally millennia."

It's also a process that can lead to some inadvertent poaching as the hawk goes to work in the countryside.

"There were quite a few pheasants that found their way into my pot and I used to share with Mabel that weren't technically mine," she said.

"I live in constant fear that there's a going to be a knock on the door one day and someone's going to say 'It was you!'"

rediscovered the work of T.H. White, author of "The Once And Future King" and, among other things, a book about his own, much less successful experience of training a goshawk in the 1930s.

In her book we follow the unhappy story of White's life and suppressed homosexuality almost as closely as their separate experiences training hawks.

"I still feel very conflicted in writing about him in the sense that he was quite an unpleasant character," Macdonald said.

The book's success has taken her by surprise, or as she put it: "I thought it was a very strange story and maybe only falconers would want to read it."

With reading tours and promotional trips, she has been kept very busy and she is keen to get back to her work.

"I love what's going on now, but I'm still looking forward to having the time to go out birdwatching and walk around and get down to some proper writing again."

(Editing by Michael Roddy and Mark Heinrich)

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