Helen Macdonald | Signed First Editions

About Helen Macdonald

Helen Macdonald was born in Surrey in 1970 and grew up in Tekels Park, a private estate in Camberley that they have described as having indelibly shaped their writing life. Both parents worked in journalism, their father as a staff photographer for the Daily Mirror, their mother for local papers. It was an observant household, in its way, and Macdonald was a self-described child naturalist from an early age, spending hours after school recording sightings of moths, foxes, and slow worms in childhood diaries.

They read at Cambridge, went on to become a Research Fellow at Jesus College, and later an affiliated research scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Alongside the academic work, they trained as a professional falconer and assisted with raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia. It is an unusual combination, the scholar and the practitioner, and it is precisely what gives their writing its particular quality: rigorous, precise, and rooted in genuine physical experience.

Macdonald is non-binary and uses they/she pronouns. That identity, and the particular kind of attention it brings to questions of self, grief, and the non-human world, runs quietly through much of their work.

H is for Hawk, published in 2014, is the book that changed everything. Written while Macdonald was still at Cambridge, it describes the year they spent training a goshawk named Mabel in the aftermath of their father’s sudden death, weaving together memoir, falconry, and a biographical study of the writer T.H. White, who had famously attempted and struggled with the same task decades earlier. Macdonald worried it was too strange, too hard to categorise. They were wrong. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction (now the Baillie Gifford Prize), the Costa Book of the Year Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It appeared on more than twenty-five best books of the year lists, including the New York Times Book Review, TIME, and the Washington Post, and has sold well over 300,000 copies in print. It sits, comfortably, within natural history & conservation, though it arrives there by way of grief, literature, and a very precise attention to the wild.

Vesper Flights followed in 2020, a collection of essays ranging across swift migrations, mushroom hunting, glowworms, ostriches, and the politics of the English countryside. It was received with the same warmth as its predecessor and confirmed that Macdonald’s first book had not been a fortunate accident.

In 2023 they published Prophet, their first novel, co-written with Sinistra Blaché. They have written and presented award-winning documentaries for the BBC and PBS, and contribute regularly to the New York Times Magazine.

The film adaptation of H is for Hawk, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe from a screenplay co-written by Emma Donoghue, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 2025 and screened at the London Film Festival before a wide US release in January 2026. Claire Foy plays Macdonald, with Brendan Gleeson also in the cast. The film has been warmly received and has brought a significant new audience to the book, at a moment when signed first editions are already becoming harder to find.