When her father died suddenly in a London street, scholar Helen Macdonald was shattered. To escape her grief, she threw herself into the solitary and obsessive work of raising Mabel, a fierce young goshawk. A lover of falconry since childhood, Helen became fascinated by author T.H. White, who also searched for solace by training a hawk. Like him, Helen shut out the human world and retreated to the wild, spending her days looking at life through the bird’s eyes. Over time she was able to face her grief, and today, Helen Macdonald credits the hawk with her breakthrough. We hear one woman’s story of coping with loss by reconnecting with the wild.

Guests

  • Helen Macdonald Writer, naturalist, and affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge; author of "H is for Hawk", winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book Award

Read A Featured Excerpt

Excerpted with permission from “H IS FOR HAWK,” copyright © 2014 by Helen Macdonald; used with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc.

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