![]() She has been an amateur naturalist from girlhood - so bird-besotted that she slept with her arms folded like wings. There’s nothing of the tourist or bystander in her approach. It muddies any facile ideas about nature and the human, and prods at how we pleat our prejudices, politics and desires into our notions of the animal world. Macdonald’s writing teems with other voices and perspectives, with her own challenges to herself. She could be the twin sister of the Lone Enraptured Male (“From Cambridge!” applies), but instead her work is an antidote to so much romantic, reductive writing about the natural world as pristine, secret, uninhabited - as a convenient blank canvas for the hero’s journey of self-discovery. Macdonald is the author of the internationally best-selling memoir “H Is for Hawk” (2015), winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. ![]() ![]() ![]() What’s that coming over the hill? The polymathic Macdonald - historian of science, naturalist, poet, illustrator and one-time falcon breeder for the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. ![]()
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