British author Helen Macdonald is on an award-winning streak. Last year her book “H is for Hawk” won the prestigious £20000 (Dh110,753) Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction. Then in January this year she defied bookmaker’s predictions to win another top award, the Costa prize for book of the year, making her a further £30,000 richer.
In fairness, the awards aren’t a surprise considering the calibre of her writing. “H is for Hawk” has been described by critics as “extraordinary”, “dazzling” and an “absolute classic of nature writing”. The multilayered book is an account of a painful period in her life following the death of her father when she trained a £800 goshawk.
I met Macdonald for the interview at a café in Cambridge. That morning she has drunk far more coffee than she normally does. In person she is lively and humorous. She is still adjusting to the dramatic changes which have occurred in her life these past few months.
“One of the things about the success of the book has been the number of people I have been meeting,” she tells me. “And it has been lovely. But it is just the difference from that year-and-a-half it took me of sitting at my desk and eating a lot of junk food and crying a lot because it was a very difficult time to go back to.”
The book was written five years after her father’s death. Although she had kept a diary, strangely everything that happened that year is very clear in her mind.
“Particularly visually I can see the scenes,” she says. “You know everyday I was out with that hawk watching her hunt. I can remember almost everything. And I think that is something that happens sometimes after you have suffered a bereavement. I think your memory becomes very clear.”
She describes the experience of having to relive some of the painful experiences as being “like jumping under water and then coming off for air”.
Even before the book’s publication, it created a hype. Unusually, there was a bidding auction among publishers. At that stage Macdonald had only written a proposal and two chapters which her agent had sent out. “It was the most extraordinary week,” she says. “I was running around London meeting all these amazing publishers.” After she settled on Jonathan Cape, there was a new worry: “I had to write the book. And that was suddenly ‘oh I better write something, I hope I can do this now’.”
She describes her writing schedule as getting up in the morning, drinking a big cup of coffee and going down to a local café. “I like writing in cafés. Because writing is such a lonely process, I like there being people around. So I have made some great local friends. Sort of pensioners and young mums from my local town. And then I would go for long walks as well.”
The book tackles at least three different themes. MacDonald explains the world is more complicated than single stories and wanted to have many voices in the book talking to each other.
“One of the themes of the book, it is not just grief, it is the attempt to put yourself in minds that are not like your own. And one of those minds in the book is the hawk’s mind, and the other mind is T.H. White, a man who I don’t think I would have liked very much if I had met him. He was a very sad and in some ways a very unpleasant man. But I was very fascinated why he tried to train a hawk.”
White is best known for writing classics such as “The Sword in the Stone”. However one of his lesser known books was a personal account of training a hawk. Macdonald read “The Goshawk” when she was only eight and describes herself as a “horribly precocious child”.
At a very young age she was obsessed with falconry and read many adult books on the subject. Yet reading “The Goshawk” left her disturbed.
“This T.H. White book was a very personal book about a man who didn’t know how to train a hawk,” she says. “It was very much a confession of his inability to do this. I say in the book that when you are a child you think of grownups who write books to tell you how to do things. And I was deeply upset by this book because not only did he not know what he was doing, he was really mistreating the hawk.”
Her narration of the life of White is skilfully woven in with her own experiences of training the hawk at a painful period in her life. The book describes how Helen would go on walks around Cambridge with the bird who was named Mabel.
“I think I got some very strange looks,” she admits. She would give the hawk a rabbit or chicken leg to feed on so it would not be so frightened. As the hawk was hungry she would eat, ignore the people and slowly get used to them.
Although Cambridge is used to eccentrics, she found it interesting how many people wouldn’t look at her. “You realise they thought maybe I was a little bit crazy because I have this hawk,” she says. “And the people that came up to talk to me were generally people from other countries or people that were maybe not the sort of average Cambridge resident.”
Macdonald figures she may also have been giving off very subtle clues that she didn’t want people to talk to her. “But I think there is a rather sad trait among a certain strand of English society to walk away from anything that looks like it might be unusual or not normal. I used to get occasional nods, that was about as much as I would get.”
In the 16th or 17th century, when falconry was a lot more common in England, the sight of someone on a stroll with a hawk wouldn’t have been so unusual. “One of the things I love about going to Abu Dhabi, or somewhere like that, in the season many people have falcons. And no one seems to take any notice. This would have been like that here as well.”
Macdonald was recently in the UAE to attend the International Falconry Festival in Abu Dhabi. “It was a great festival. There were people from all over the world and I met a lot of old friends.”
While she was there she was given a medal by the International Association for Falconry for services to the sport because of her book. “One of the most wonderful honours,” she says. “I was very touched by that.”
Macdonald is no stranger to the UAE. Back in the Nineties she used to work for the National Aviation Research Centre in Abu Dhabi. She was helping breed falcons and doing research on the wild populations with projects in places such as Siberia, Pakistan, and Kazakhstan. Macdonald was based in Wales and Abu Dhabi.
Falconry is a lot bigger in the Emirates than in the United Kingdom. “I think Shaikh Zayed was a tremendously good falconer and sort of a big figurehead of falconry in the Emirates.”
She talks with emotion about her time in the UAE. “You know, one of the great things about falconry is that — because falcons and hawks are the same all over the world — it is the same all over the world. Even if it has different local traditions, you still have to train a hawk in the same way. So it allows enormously friendly sort of personal discussions about hawks across cultures. I love meeting falconers in the Emirates. I have lovely conversations with people out [there] and we were all bonded by our love of falconry.”
She mentions the long tradition of falconry in Bedouin culture. “One of things I like about falconry in the Gulf is the way in which falconers from all different parts of society can sit and talk as equals around campfires at night,” she says. “And talk about the flights and talk about the falcons.”
It is also a much more male sport in the Gulf. “One of things I enjoy over the last maybe few decades in western falconry is that there were more people like me. I was always thought of as being very strange when I was small for wanting to fly falcons by all the male falconers that I knew. And now there are many more women falconers. And I have seen some astonishing falconry from women.”
I ask how she learnt to write the way she does. “I love words. So I guess in one sense in answer to that is I used to write lots of poetry. If you write lots of poetry you sort of give up worrying about short sentences and strange formulations, grammatical formulations.”
Macdonald explains how what caught her eye when she was flying the hawk were not the normal things. “I didn’t really see cars or people,” she says. “What were important to me were wingbeats and running rabbits, and those are the things I took note of.”
One of her tips to writers is to read everything. “I have never liked people who say you should read classics, or you should only read literature. Read everything from airport novels to the backs of cereal packets. The more you read the more language becomes something like a river you can swim in. And then the words will just come to you.”
She also gives credit to her photographer father for the visual effect of her writing. “The book is in many senses about him teaching me about how to see the world. And his world was about images, and about sharp crystal clear images in a very different medium. It is partly why I try and capture scenes in the way I do. I want to make the picture, you know.”
The feedback from readers has been tremendous. MacDonald tells me about the scores of letters she has received which she plans to answer when it calms down. They include people who have suffered great losses and somehow animals have helped them through that period of time. “You know I have many times been in tears talking to people,” she says. “It’s been amazing.”
When MacDonald was very young, she remembers falconers as being very secretive people. One reason could be there were not many hawks around. “I think they were also nervous about people thinking maybe it was a cruel kind of activity. One of the joys of this book has been meeting people who have told me they didn’t really understand what falconry was. And they thought it might be quite a cruel thing. Actually they felt after reading my book that it’s a very interesting relationship between humans and the wild.”
Her mother has been very happy with her success. “Both of us said that we were very sad that my father should have been there. Even though the book was about him not being there.”
She recounts winning the Samuel Johnson Prize last year, which is the most prestigious prize for nonfiction in the UK.
“I was thrilled and surprised,” she says. “My mother came to the dinner. It was a prize dinner. It was at the Royal Institute of British Architects and there were many speeches and some delicious food. My mother was there and my publishers, people from my literary agency. I kept forgetting why we were there. So I would start eating and it would be delicious and suddenly I would remember why we were there and I couldn’t eat another bite. I would put my fork down and sort of shiver in terror and excitement. And then I would forget and start eating again. But it was one of the most extraordinary developments. After the book won the award I couldn’t sleep at all. I just lay there full of adrenaline.”
The success of the book has changed Macdonald’s life enormously. For one she is a lot more busy, doing talks and events, and doesn’t have time anymore to sit around at home to write or go for walks. In March she is going to the United States and Canada to do readings and a tour. Later she is travelling to New Zealand and Australia.
On a deeper level she feels less “scared” of people. She also has more financial security. “I have been kind of struggling to pay the bills for many years, being an academic and then being a writer. For a while at least I am not so worried about that.”
Having money in the bank means she has more time to write her next book. “I think it is that difficult second album syndrome you know that musicians talk about. If something is very successful it is very strange to think about what to do next.”
Macdonald has a two-book deal with her publishers Jonathan Cape. However, she doesn’t think her next book will be on falcons. “One person told me I should think about writing detective stories with a falconer as a main character. I think I am not going to do that,” she laughs.
Prior to “H is for Hawk” she wrote two other books. One on poetry, and another called “Falcon”, which is more of an academic book. When she worked in the Gulf she was very interested in how a lot of conservationists were making statements about falconry and conserving the environment.
“But they weren’t interested in the culture of falconry, and I became more and more interested in that when I was working in it,” she says. “I wanted to know more about the culture of falconry. So I came back to university and studied the history of science.”
“Falcon”, which has been translated into Arabic, was published in 2006 and is a cultural history of the strange relationship with birds of prey which goes back perhaps 4000 years.
“It goes through the history of falconry and it talks about how falcons are seen in different cultures. But it has some of the same messages in it. It has this message that we use nature as a mirror of our own culture and our own needs and how that can be both amazing but also quite dangerous for us and for the natural world.”
During her time working in Abu Dhabi she has learnt that there are still new things happening in falconry all the time. “For example when I went to the falconry festival a few weeks ago, I saw how falcon racing has become very popular now in the Gulf states,” she says. “Also now there are remote-controlled birds that you can fly your falcon after. So these are astonishingly new things. But the hawks themselves are the same. It taught me that this thing that I always thought was unchanging actually has got a lot of amazing new things happening within it.”
One of the techniques distinctive in falconry is the use of hoods for training. “All falcons in the West pretty much use hoods these days,” she says. “They are an extremely good way of training a hawk and they learnt that from Arab falconers. It was the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the 2nd Hohenstaufen who was an extraordinary figure. He had many Arab falconers in his court. He learnt all these amazing techniques and basically said to everyone else: ‘guys, you should be using these, these are amazing’.”
Macdonald loves that sense of a transfer of knowledge and ways of thinking about the world at that time between the Arab world and the West. “Particularly now at a time when people are desperately trying to build walls,” she says. “I love that, even in a tiny way, the history of falconry shows that there is that wonderful sense that cultures can talk about the same thing and forge very strong links.”
Syed Hamad Ali is a writer based in London.
