Helen Macdonald

Writing about her childhood for The Guardian in 2018, Macdonald said,

Macdonald also helped make the film "10 X Murmuration" with filmmaker Sarah Wood as part of a 2015 exhibition at the Brighton Festival. In "H is for Hawk: a New Chapter", part of BBC's Natural World series in 2017, she trained a new goshawk chick.

Macdonald won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction for H is for Hawk The book—which also became a Sunday Times best-seller—describes the year Macdonald spent after the death of her father Alisdair Macdonald, training a Northern goshawk named Mabel, and includes biographical material about the naturalist and writer T. H. White.

Macdonald has written and narrated radio programmes, and appeared in the BBC Four documentary series, Birds Britannia, in 2010. Her books include Shaler's Fish (2001), Falcon (2006), and H is for Hawk (2014).

Helen Macdonald was educated at Cambridge University. She was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge from 2004 to 2007. She is an Affiliated Research Scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.

"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. 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".

Helen Macdonald (born 1970) is an English writer, naturalist, and an Affiliated Research Scholar at the University of Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science. She is best known as the author of H is for Hawk, which won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book Award. In 2016, it also won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France.