Helen Macdonald's memoir H is for Hawk is a flying lesson in grief

It's the sad postscript to a book that follows the Cambridge historian and naturalist's attempts to deal with the death of her beloved father, the photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, by raising a 10-week-old goshawk chick.

"She was fine in the afternoon and in the morning she was cold, dead on the floor, and I miss her to bits," Macdonald says.

"I got a lovely message from the man who was looking after her, and he was very upset. He wrote that she was the softest goshawk he'd ever known, and then, in brackets, he said: 'Unless you were a rabbit'."

There are two types of memoir that deal with bereavement. The first comes from the midst of grief. Joan Didion wrote the extraordinarily unsettling The Year of Magical Thinking in the immediate aftermath of the death of her husband, John Dunne.

H Is for Hawk is the other kind, written with emotional distance from the perspective of the veteran who has returned from the trenches and lived to tell the tale.

Macdonald waited five years before she put her experience into a book but wrote in a journal almost from that morning in 2007 when her mother called with news from the Waterloo hospital of her father's sudden death.

That was the moment, Macdonald writes, when the "world leaned in, whispered farewells and was gone". Her father was taking pictures of storm damage when he suffered a heart attack. Macdonald saw the final image from his camera, "blurred, taken from a low angle, far too low; an empty London street".

The diary was a foolish attempt, Macdonald says, to "stitch the world back together again, to try and write the world back into existence. It sounds overblown, but that's how it felt. I could do words, they made things real, and I wrote and wrote but I didn't think for a long while it would be a story that other people might want to read, that this was more than a story about a bitter woman and a bird. It was about love and loss and nature and life."

Since its publication in Britain in January 2014, H Is for Hawk has won two prestigious international prizes, the Samuel Johnson Award for Non Fiction and the Costa Book Award.

The chairman of the Costa judging panel, the novelist Robert Harris, rhapsodised H Is for Hawk as a haunting book, brilliantly written, full of muscular, scalpel-like prose that stares down grief with "the unblinking eye of a hawk".

"When I started to write [the book] I tried to be less full on about how things were, partly because I was a bit shy and partly because I felt it would come across as self-indulgent," Macdonald recalls.

"It didn't work, I couldn't write. I thought, 'I have to be brave here, I have to put it all on the page, particularly the physical sense of grief and how that felt'. Once I realised I had to say it like it was, the book started to flow. I didn't really have choice in that but enough time had gone past where it wasn't quite me anymore."

At the time of her father's death Macdonald was wrapping up her third and final year as a research fellow of Cambridge University. She had a degree in English but was a historian of science. Her previous non-fiction works included Falcon (2006) and Shaler's Fish (2001), and she had three books of poetry to her name.

Until H Is for Hawk, her literary self and the bird lover had never truly met. "I guess this book is the first time that's really happened," she says. "All of me is in this book, not half of me."

Both Macdonald and her father were watchers of the sky. Her passion was birds; his was for planes, a hangover from his boyhood witness of the Battle for Britain.

"We shared the same way of looking at the world and we used to laugh a lot that birds and aeroplanes were really uncool obsessions to have," says Macdonald, who at age six used to sleep with her arms folded back like wings.

"He taught me about things to value in the world, that sense of the world being full of extraordinary things and that part of your job on the earth, while you are here, is to take note of them."

Macdonald had come across her first goshawk in Terence Hanbury White's celebrated account, The Goshawk, which she had read as a shy, knock-kneed eight-year-old. T. H. White, the author of The Sword and the Stone, had in the 1930s tried to master a goshawk using tricks gleaned from medieval times. Macdonald reread her red-covered copy in the weeks after her father's death. About then the hawk began to appear in her dreams.

Macdonald had kept kestrels and flown merlins, and as a falconer had assisted Gulf States' captive-breeding programs but she had taken a dislike to the goshawk, Britain's deadliest bird of prey. Muscular like a pit bull, she regarded them as "spooky, pale-eyed psychopaths that lived and killed in woodside thickets". Hawks fell extinct in Britain in the late 19th century and surviving populations are descendants of breeding imports from Europe.

Unmoored by grief, Macdonald began rereading White's chronicle and, on a whim, purchased Mabel for £800 over the internet from an Irish hawk breeder, picking her up from a Scottish quay.

There are far more sensible ways of dealing with grief than taming a goshawk, she concedes. "I don't recommend it on the National Health Service". Looking back, Macdonald thinks she simply wanted to fly with the hawk to find her father and bring him home again.

To win Mabel's trust, Macdonald spent exhausting hours in perfect stillness, fighting off cramps, as she attempted to become invisible to her hawk, and contrasts her own missteps with those of White's cruelty, drawing deeply from his journals and writings held in the archives of the Harry Ransom Centre in Texas, to understand White's reflex for mastery over his hawk.

It is here that H Is for Hawk ventures into the arcane world of hunting, a vocabulary understood by Tudor kings and Arab sheikhs. Bating is that headlong dive of rage and terror by which the hawk leaps from the fist in a mad dash for freedom. A happy hawk signals its contentment by "rousing".

Hawks aren't social animals like dogs or horses, explains Macdonald. They are more like cats: "much more self possessed, much more willful and, to start with at least, bonding with a hawk is about food; getting a hawk to like you by bribing him with delicious bits of raw steak".

It was a huge distraction in those early days when the world shrank to Macdonald and Mabel, and keeper and bird formed an extraordinary bond. .

But then "this thing happened later in the year when I started to watch her fly around and hunt like a wild hawk". "That was "a very different disappearance on my behalf," Macdonald says. "It was a flight, an absolute flight from everything human. I didn't want to be me any more, I wanted to be a hawk, a feral, self-possessed wild creature that didn't feel any human emotions, and I managed that pretty well."

It was at this point that Macdonald surmises her grief turned into clinical depression, a condition she diagnoses as "never truly mad, more mad north-north-west".

"I used to wake up in the morning my face soaking wet with tears. I used to think I had an allergy or some weird eye disorder and I'd just been weeping while I was asleep.

"There was a moment [at] my dad's memorial when I realised I'd made this terrible error, that you need people in your life, you can't live without people, you can't live without the love of friends and family. I realised I needed to get help and went to the doctors. It seems so simple now but at the time it was this huge revelation."

Macdonald caught from her father the slight emotional distance of a lifetime spent looking through a camera lens. But grief still catches her mid-sentence. Macdonald laughs a lot as we speak by phone from her home in Newmarket, not far from Cambridge, where the return of arctic birds to the fenlands has signalled the start of spring. Whenever she comes to the subject of her father's absence, however, her voice fades.

It falls away to a whisper as she speaks of the regrets she has in failing to support her mother and brother, James, in their grief. "I've apologised to them many times. I ran away from everything. My mum's amazing and she says, 'That's just like you Helen'. 'We knew you'd be OK, and you knew we'd be OK'."

Now Mabel is gone, and she is considering raising a second chick. Grief, she concludes, is love with no place to go. "You realise what you are feeling for your lost loved one or lost parent that has died is just love, and that makes it somehow bearable."

H Is for Hawk is published by Random House at $22.99. Helen Macdonald will be a guest at Sydney Writers' Festival, May 18-24, and will give the closing address on nature teaches us to live.

And another thing: Macdonald's father was best known for taking the photo of Princess Diana and Prince Charles kissing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after their wedding.