Bronte Coates talks with Helen Macdonald about her award-winning memoir, H is for Hawk.

In H is for Hawk, you decide to train a goshawk (Mabel) in response to the grief you felt at your father’s death. Would you now recommend this decision to others?

Ha! No, I don’t recommend it at all. Training and free-flying a captive-bred goshawk was my own rather eccentric way of dealing with bereavement. But there’s no ‘right’ way to go about grieving: you must follow your own path. I needed to escape myself and my grief after my father’s death and the hawk was my way of doing so. But I’d been a falconer for 25 years before the events described in the book so the experience wasn’t something new to me and I knew what I was doing. Hawk-training is difficult and hugely time-consuming, and goshawks in particular are very hard to handle.

Several readers have commented on how your book defies conventional classification – it is at once nature writing, memoir, history and so forth. You have called it a ‘strange’ book yourself. Were there moments during the writing process where you tried to force some kind of structure onto it? And is this blending of genres something you think we’ll see more of from you or elsewhere in the future?

Grief shatters easy narratives and familiar stories, and I wanted the book’s structure to reflect that. So the first chapter is straightforward nature writing, the second is grief memoir, and the third, literary biography. After those three chapters, the different genres start crashing into one another and get tangled and confused. In the actual process of writing, it wasn’t so much a forcing as a constant negotiation between the demands of form, structure, style, story-telling, and the desires of the book itself – that last sounds odd, but working with a half-written book is a little like working with something that’s almost alive and can resist your plans. Sometimes it refused to let me say things and at other times I found myself writing things I had no idea would be in the book at all. I’d like to continue to experiment with blending genres in the future, yes, absolutely.

My book club read H is for Hawk earlier this year and we all had strong reactions to your narrative of T.H. White, and his treatment of Gos (his hawk) – some very negative toward White. How did you see his story as informing your own?

White was not very much like me. But he made the same mistake I did: use the hawk as a mirror. In retrospect I wanted to fly a hawk partly because I wanted to be like a hawk: solitary, powerful, utterly free from human hurt, and possessed of a ferocity that chimed with the inner rage of my grief. Back in 1936, White saw his own hawk as everything he wanted to be – free from societal conventions, sadistic, feral and slightly fey. His story is caught up with mine in the book partly because it too casts light on how hard it is for any of us to see past our own selves and our own cultural assumptions when we interact with the natural world.

Did White’s treatment of Gos cause you to worry about how other uninformed people might take to training hawks (or other animals) in the world today?

Many people mistreat animals – and each other – and don’t realise they are doing so. This is why White’s story is so painful: he was working from a position of ignorance, and his dreadful upbringing didn’t give him any of the tools to love and care for things, including himself. To work with animals you need kindness, patience, knowledge of their needs, and a sense of empathy with living creatures. Sometimes these are things life hasn’t dealt you, things you need to learn. Certainly no-one should consider learning how to train a hawk without being personally mentored by an expert in the art.

What I loved best about H is for Hawk is the way you probed the tension that exists between wilderness and the ‘tamed’ world. You question whether the human desire to be close to wilderness can be counter-intuitive to our needs as human, as well as the very essence of wilderness. Did writing this book help to clarify your views on this topic, or did it just lead to more questions?

That year with Mabel had already taught me a good deal about the meaning of nature and the importance of balance in our lives. I ran too far towards wildness and needed to claw my way back into the human world. Writing the book didn’t clarify things, as such, but it was good to set those things down in words, and reminded me again that ‘wilderness’ and ‘wildness’ are human concepts, with their own long and complex histories.

I was also blown away by the immediacy of the scenes in which you hunt with Mabel – I truly felt like I was in those woods with you both. How did you go about writing these particular moments?

Those scenes in the book were actually the easiest to write; it felt sometimes as if they almost wrote themselves. Being out with Mabel and watching her fly free and hunt like a wild hawk was an extraordinary and transporting experience, and it shines brightly in recollection. It was much harder to write frankly of my own emotional struggles.

Since its publication, what has been your favorite response to the book? (I heard some readers are bringing their own hawks along to meet you!)

Yes! My friend Simone, an exceptionally skilled falconer who lives near Seattle, brought her small falcon Henry to a talk at a bookshop there. He’s a marvelously tame and cheerful bird. He sat on her knee and preened his feathers while I spoke, a wonderfully distracting and bewitching presence in the room. I loved that. I also loved the moment when a small boy asked me what the biggest animal Mabel ever caught was, and looked very, very disappointed when I said ‘a big rabbit’. I think he wanted me to say a deer or a horse. But the most moving responses to the book have come from people who’ve suffered their own losses, or have found themselves in very dark times, and who have told me that they found something in its pages that somehow comforted or assisted them. That has astonished me; I had no idea that this might happen when I wrote it.

You were recently in Australia for the Sydney Writers’ Festival and I wondered if this allowed you time to explore the landscapes and birds here. If yes, how have you found it?

I had a brief and exquisitely beautiful walk in the Blue Mountains at Katoomba and got to meet a flock of cockatoos in Sydney Botanical Gardens that ambled across the lawns like a crowd of boisterous toddlers in feathered suits. But there’s not much time on a book tour to go birding or botanizing. The birds here are extraordinary. I wish I’d had more time to see them. If I had to pick one bird-related moment that floored me, it was while I was being driven to Katoomba by one of the festival drivers, a lovely man called Chris. In a lull in the conversation I looked out of the window and above me were a pair of yellow-tailed black cockatoos flying slowly overhead, silhouetted against a pale, milky sky. They seemed like gods from another age, somehow. Absolutely astonishing.

You’ve described yourself as ‘a horribly precocious reader’ from a young age. What advice do you have for parents of other such readers?

Let your kids read everything they can, take them to libraries, buy them books, don’t ever tell them that what they are reading is too old for them. I loved reading Sherlock Holmes stories before I knew what half the words in them meant, and that didn’t matter at all. Reading a lot of different kinds of books when you’re young is a wonderful way to learn that the world is bigger than you and full of things that are not like you; it makes life vastly more complicated, rich, beautiful and strange.