H Is For Hawk & Shaler's Fish
Literary phenomenon Helen MacDonald visits the Wisconsin Book Festival to celebrate the paperback release of her sensational memoir, H Is For Hawk, and her marvelous debut poetry collection, Shaler's Fish.
About H Is For Hawk:
Helen Macdonald’s “instant classic” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) memoir H Is For Hawk took the literary world by storm last year, landing on almost every end of the year “best of” list. Beloved by literary critics, award panels, and readers alike, it is on one level the truly remarkable story of one woman’s resolve to raise and train the most bloodthirsty of birds: the goshawk. But it is also a heartwrenching account of Macdonald’s grief at the sudden death of her father; a literary meditation on The Sword and the Stone author T.H.White—a writer who also sought to fill a void through training a goshawk; and a gripping piece of nature writing that “reads like a thriller” (The Guardian) and transports both writer and reader to the edge of humanity and back. Weaving together obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history, H Is For Hawk is a distinctive, surprising blend of nature writing and memoir from a very gifted writer.
About Shaler's Fish:
Before Helen Macdonald chronicled the experience of adopting a goshawk in H Is for Hawk, she was a poet, and Shaler's Fish is her debut collection of poems rooted in the natural world, published for the first time in the United States. With a masterful ear for musical phrasing as well as an utterly unique way of seeing the earth around her, she writes deft, daring verse; her language is melodic and opulent while her observations are shrewd and incisive. These poems—lush, lyrical, and vibrantly evocative—parse images from the landscape and then turn inward to consider the human consciousness that witnesses, processes, and manipulates the landscape. From an outstanding literary innovator, Shaler's Fish is a joyous celebration of the natural world and a profound meditation on being alive in it.
Helen MacDonald
Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator and naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, and three collections of poetry, including Shaler's Fish. Macdonald was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a professional falconer, and has assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia. She now writes for the New York Times Magazine.