7.4 /10 1 Votes7.4
Publisher Jonathan Cape Pages 300 pp. Originally published 31 July 2014 Awards Baillie Gifford Prize | 3.7/5 Goodreads Publication date 2014 ISBN 0-224-09700-8 OCLC 898117636 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Nominations Goodreads Choice Awards Best Nonfiction, National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir/Autobiography Similar Helen Macdonald books, Baillie Gifford Prize winners, Memoirs | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Helen macdonald h is for hawk
H is for Hawk is a memoir by British author Helen Macdonald. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year award among other honours.
Contents
- Helen macdonald h is for hawk
- Helen macdonald 5x15 h is for hawk
- Content
- Reception
- Awards and honours
- References
Helen macdonald 5x15 h is for hawk
Content
H is for Hawk tells Macdonald's story of the year she spent training a goshawk in the wake of her father's death. Her father, Alisdair Macdonald, was a respected photojournalist who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2007. Having been a falconer for many years, she purchased a young goshawk to help her through the grieving process.
Reception
The book reached the The Sunday Times best-seller list within two weeks of being published in July 2014.
In an interview with The Guardian, Macdonald said, "While the backbone of the book is a memoir about that year when I lost my father and trained a hawk, there are also other things tangled up in that story which are not memoir. There is the shadow biography of TH White, and a lot of nature-writing, too. I was trying to let these different genres speak to each other."
Judges of the Samuel Johnson Prize specifically highlighted that marriage of genres as one of the reasons for selecting H is for Hawk as the winner.