Helen MacDonald

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.[4] In 2016, it also won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France.

Macdonald was born in 1970, the child of Daily Mirror photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, and grew up in Surrey. Writing about her childhood for The Guardian in 2018, Macdonald said, 

Macdonald has written and narrated several radio programs and appeared on television in the BBC Four documentary series Birds Britannia in 2010. Their books include Shaler's Fish (2001), Falcon (2006), H is for Hawk (2014), and Vesper Flights (2020). Macdonald received critical acclaim for H is for Hawk, including the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction and the Costa Book Award. 

The book—which also became a Sunday Times best-seller—describes the year Macdonald spent after the death of her father training a Northern goshawk named Mabel and includes biographical material about the naturalist and writer T. H. White.

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 presented the BBC Four documentary, The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway, in 2020. That same year saw the publication of their fourth book, Vesper Flights, a collection of essays about "the human relationship to the natural world."