Fight or flight

Helen Macdonald's memoir H is for Hawk explored the romance of falconry, nature's transformative power and the ferocity of grief. Mark Bailey meets the author as her tale becomes a star-studded movie

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On a crisp winter morning in Hawkedon, West Suffolk, frost covers the village green and mist wreathes the corrugated fields beyond the church. Inside a cosy cottage alive with the chatter of birds, Helen Macdonald is talking about the day she became a ghost.

Back in 2014, the writer (who now identifies as non-binary, and is happy to be referred to as she or they) released His for Hawk - a uniquely intelligent, eccentric, harrowing and profound memoir. The book chronicled the year that Macdonald, then an academic in the history and philosophy of science department at Cambridge University, trained a Eurasian goshawk as a way to navigate the swirling vortex of grief that followed the death of their father, Alisdair Macdonald, a respected press photographer.

The memoir won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year and touched thousands of people struggling with grief. Now Macdonald is awaiting January's cinematic release of the His for Hawk movie, which stars Claire Foy (Wolf Hall, The Crown) as Helen and Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges, The Banshees of Inisherin) as Alisdair.

“There were moments that have been very weird,” admits Macdonald, 55, nursing a mug of tea and sharing a plate of mince pies. “When I went to the set it was in dank October, mid-afternoon and getting dark. I'm in my old college, Jesus College, which is transformed, full of giant lights and people. And in the cloisters there's Claire Foy, dressed as me, carrying a goshawk. And (Irish actress) Denise Gough dressed as my friend Christina. And I had this incredibly dizzy moment. It felt like I was a ghost watching myself in the past.”

Macdonald's memoir is deeply personal. Was it not painful to hand control over to director Philippa Lowthorpe (The Other Boleyn Girl) and screenwriter Emma Donoghue (