Reading List

Authors Like Helen Macdonald

When their father died suddenly, Macdonald bought a goshawk. H is for Hawk (2014) is what came of it: the training of a bird that does not want to be trained, grief that will not behave, and running underneath it the life of T. H. White, who attempted the same thing in the 1930s and made a mess of it. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year, and a film adaptation with Claire Foy as Macdonald and Brendan Gleeson as their father had an awards run in late 2025 and opened more widely in January 2026. Vesper Flights (2020) followed: forty-one essays on swifts, nests, migraines, mushrooms, hares, ostrich farming and refugees, which Macdonald describes as a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities concerned with the quality of wonder. Then something nobody expected — Prophet (2023), a speculative thriller and queer romance written with Sin Blaché, in which an American diner materialises overnight in a British field and nostalgia turns out to be a weapon. Macdonald worked for years in raptor research before becoming a historian of science, is an affiliated research scholar at Cambridge, and lives in Suffolk with two parrots collectively known as the Bugs. The ten below cover the birds, the grief and the objection to writing about both.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Nature writing · Birds, grief, landscape · Costa Book of the Year · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Helen Macdonald, start with the two books that are inside H is for Hawk: T. H. White's The Goshawk, which Macdonald spends the book arguing with, and J. A. Baker's The Peregrine, the standard every raptor book is measured against. For grief and landscape now, read Amy Liptrot or Katherine May. Sy Montgomery is the American equivalent on animals as individuals, and Robert Macfarlane the other major British nature writer. And Kathleen Jamie is the sharpest critic of this whole genre.

Every book by Helen Macdonald →

10 authors like Helen Macdonald

01
Older than the genre · The book inside the book

T. H. White

British · The Goshawk (1951), The Once and Future King (1958)

White bought a goshawk in 1936, knew almost nothing about falconry beyond what he had read in seventeenth-century manuals, and kept a record of the disaster that followed: sleeplessness, cruelty, obsession and the bird's eventual escape. He did not publish it for fifteen years. He is far better known for The Once and Future King, the Arthurian sequence behind Camelot and Disney's The Sword in the Stone, and he lived much of his life isolated and unhappy.

Not a comparable author so much as the other half of H is for Hawk. Macdonald braids White's life through their own, reads his failure with the hawk as a symptom of everything he could not admit about himself, and is by turns furious with him and protective of him. Reading The Goshawk afterwards is a genuinely strange experience: you already know the man, and you can see exactly what Macdonald saw. Read it second, never first.

— Lisanne
02
Older than the genre · The standard

J. A. Baker

British · The Peregrine (1967)

Baker spent ten winters following peregrines across the Essex farmland near his home, on foot and by bicycle, and compressed the notebooks into a single invented season. The prose is unlike anything else in English nature writing — hallucinatory, violent, increasingly indistinguishable from the bird's own point of view. He published almost nothing else, worked as a manager at an automobile association office, and remained obscure until Robert Macfarlane and others revived the book decades later.

The book every raptor writer since has had to answer, Macdonald included. Where Macdonald keeps hold of the human self that is grieving, Baker sets about dissolving his own until there is very little left but the hunt. It is the more extreme book and the greater one, and it is also the case against the confessional mode: no biography, no explanation, no comfort. A hundred and fifty pages, and it will take you longer than that.

— Lisanne
03
The same year, the same grief

Amy Liptrot

British · The Outrun (2016), The Instant (2022)

The Outrun is about returning to Orkney after years in London, working seasonal shifts counting corncrakes and swimming in cold water while rebuilding a life after alcohol addiction. It won the Wainwright Prize and the PEN Ackerley Prize, and Nora Fingscheidt filmed it in 2024 with Saoirse Ronan. The Instant follows a period in Berlin and is the more restless book.

The closest contemporary in shape: a person in pieces, a specific landscape, a species to count, and a recovery that the book refuses to make tidy. Both writers use fieldwork as structure rather than as scenery — the hawk's training schedule and the corncrake survey are doing the same job of holding a narrator together. Liptrot is plainer and more exposed. Read The Outrun next.

— Lisanne
Every book by Amy Liptrot →
04
The wintering version

Katherine May

British · The Electricity of Every Living Thing (2018), Wintering (2020), Enchantment (2023)

Wintering argues that periods of withdrawal — illness, grief, burnout, a bad year — are a season rather than a failure, and moves through cold-water swimming, Nordic light, bees and folklore. It became a word-of-mouth bestseller. The Electricity of Every Living Thing is about walking the South West Coast Path, and Enchantment is about recovering a sense of wonder after a period of exhaustion.

What the grief-and-landscape book looks like when it is written as consolation rather than as pursuit. Macdonald's response to loss is to take on something difficult and half-wild; May's is to stop and let the season pass. Both are honest about the limits of the strategy. If H is for Hawk spoke to you but the hawk was more animal than you wanted, this is the gentler route through the same territory.

— Lisanne

Every book by Katherine May →

Authors like Katherine May →

05
The American equivalent

Sy Montgomery

American · The Good Good Pig (2006), The Soul of an Octopus (2015)

The Soul of an Octopus comes out of three years with octopuses at the New England Aquarium and in the wild, taking seriously the question of what they experience; it was a National Book Award finalist. Her 2011 Orion essay about an octopus named Athena remains that magazine's most-read piece. She has written thirty-eight books, and the New York Times has called her one of the finest chroniclers of the natural world.

The reviewers said it first: Montgomery's octopus book does for the animal what H is for Hawk did for raptors. Both build a book on a sustained relationship with one creature, both mourn it when it dies, and both refuse the pose of scientific detachment. Montgomery is warmer and more companionable; Macdonald is harder on themselves and better at the sentence. Read The Soul of an Octopus.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sy Montgomery →

Authors like Sy Montgomery →

06
The other major British nature writer

Robert Macfarlane

British · The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015), Underland (2019)

Macfarlane writes about walking, mountains and what lies beneath them: old paths and sea roads in The Old Ways, the vocabulary regional English keeps for landscape in Landmarks, and in Underland caves, catacombs, glacier moulins and a Finnish repository built to hold nuclear waste for a hundred thousand years. He teaches at Cambridge and did as much as anyone to bring J. A. Baker back into print.

The other name on every British nature-writing shelf, and the useful contrast. Macfarlane goes outward — a route, a region, a geological era — where Macdonald goes inward, and his books have almost no personal crisis in them at all. He is also the reason The Peregrine is readily available today. Read Underland if the landscape rather than the bird was what held you.

— Lisanne

Every book by Robert Macfarlane →

07
The whale, and what is in it

Rebecca Giggs

Australian · Fathoms: The World in the Whale (2020)

Fathoms begins with a humpback stranded on a Perth beach and expands outward into everything a whale now carries: plastic, industrial chemicals, sonar, the history of whaling, the economics of whale watching, and the question of what it means that an animal's body has become an archive of human activity. Giggs writes from Western Australia and teaches at Macquarie University.

The same instinct pushed toward the environmental argument. Macdonald's essays repeatedly turn a bird into a way of seeing something political — migration, borders, what we do to land — and Giggs does that for an entire ocean, at greater length and with more anger. The prose is the closest on this list to Macdonald's in ambition. Read it if the essays in Vesper Flights were your favourites.

— Lisanne
08
The elder statesman

Richard Mabey

British · Food for Free (1972), Flora Britannica (1996), Nature Cure (2005)

Mabey has been writing about the British landscape for more than fifty years. Food for Free taught a generation to forage, Flora Britannica assembled the folklore and local uses of British plants from thousands of contributors, and Nature Cure describes a long depression and the slow recovery that followed a move from the Chilterns to Norfolk. He has also written a biography of Gilbert White, the eighteenth-century curate whose parish observations founded the whole tradition.

The writer who established, decades before it became a genre, that a nature book could be about the author's own mind without being self-indulgent. Nature Cure is the direct ancestor of H is for Hawk and of most of what has followed it, and Mabey is more knowledgeable about actual plants and birds than any of his successors. Read him if you want the natural history to be load-bearing.

— Lisanne
09
What the animal can actually perceive

Ed Yong

British-American · I Contain Multitudes (2016), An Immense World (2022)

An Immense World works through what animals actually detect — the electrical field a fish reads, the infrared a rattlesnake sees, what a dog gets from a lamp post — and argues that every creature lives inside its own sensory bubble. It won the Royal Society's science book prize and the Carnegie Medal. Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2021 for his pandemic coverage at The Atlantic.

The scientific check on the intimacy. Macdonald is unusually careful about not pretending to know what the hawk experiences — the whole book turns on the gap — and Yong spends four hundred pages establishing how wide that gap actually is for every species. Read him after Vesper Flights, and the essays acquire a floor under them.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ed Yong →

Authors like Ed Yong →

10
The argument against the genre

Kathleen Jamie

Scottish · Findings (2005), Sightlines (2012), Surfacing (2019)

Jamie is a poet who writes essays about gannet colonies, a whale skeleton in a Bergen museum, an archaeological dig in Alaska and a hospital laboratory looking at her own cells. She held the post of Scots Makar, the national poet, from 2021 to 2024. She is also the author of the review that gave the critique of modern nature writing its most quoted phrase, describing the figure of the lone enraptured male striding into a landscape in search of himself.

The best objection to this shelf, made from inside it. Jamie's complaint is not that people should stop writing about nature but that too many of them arrive with a personal crisis and use the landscape to resolve it, with the actual place reduced to a backdrop. H is for Hawk is a grief memoir with a bird in it, and it is fair to ask what the goshawk got out of the arrangement. Jamie writes the opposite: attention outward, ego kept small. Read Sightlines.

— Lisanne
Every book by Kathleen Jamie →

Where to start if you loved Helen Macdonald

If you want the book inside the book, read T. H. White.

The Goshawk. The 1930s attempt that Macdonald spends their own book arguing with.

If you want the standard, read J. A. Baker.

The Peregrine. Ten winters in Essex, compressed into one hallucinatory season.

If you want the same grief now, read Amy Liptrot.

The Outrun. Orkney, corncrake surveys, cold water and a life rebuilt.

If you loved Vesper Flights, read Rebecca Giggs.

Fathoms. A stranded humpback, and everything a whale now carries inside it.

If you want the argument against it, read Kathleen Jamie.

Sightlines. Attention pointed outward, with the author kept small.

If you want more non-fiction of this kind

My shelf has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Helen Macdonald

Who should I read if I love Helen Macdonald?

Start with the two books inside H is for Hawk: T. H. White's The Goshawk, which Macdonald argues with throughout, and J. A. Baker's The Peregrine, the standard for writing about raptors. For grief and landscape written now, Amy Liptrot and Katherine May. Sy Montgomery is the American equivalent on animals as individuals, Robert Macfarlane the other major British nature writer, Rebecca Giggs the closest in ambition, and Richard Mabey the elder statesman who got there first. Ed Yong supplies the science. Kathleen Jamie is the sharpest critic of the whole genre and worth reading for that reason.

Is there a film of H is for Hawk?

Yes. Claire Foy plays Macdonald and Brendan Gleeson plays their father. It had an awards-qualifying run in selected cinemas in late 2025 and went into wider release in January 2026. Whether it can carry the book's double structure — the training of the hawk alongside the life of T. H. White — is the obvious question, and worth having read the book first to judge.

Which Helen Macdonald book should I start with?

H is for Hawk (2014), which won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year and is the reason for everything else. Vesper Flights (2020) is forty-one shorter essays and the better book to dip into — swifts, nests, hares, mushrooms, ostrich farming, migraines, and several pieces that turn out to be about migration and borders. Prophet (2023) is a novel written with Sin Blaché and is a completely different proposition.

Is Helen Macdonald writing a new book?

Nothing has been announced as of September 2026. The nature book that was meant to follow Vesper Flights was to be about albatrosses on Midway Atoll, where a military base and an enormous seabird colony share an island, and the pandemic made the trip impossible. What came instead was Prophet, the novel written with Sin Blaché. The albatross project has not been formally abandoned.

What is Prophet about?

An American diner appears overnight in an empty British field. Then more objects: toys, fairground rides, pets, other treasured things from the past. People begin dying, stifled by their own remembered joy. Two intelligence operatives with a complicated history are sent to find out what is producing it. It is part speculative thriller, part queer romance, and it is genuinely nothing like the nature writing — readers arriving from H is for Hawk should know that going in.

Which pronouns does Helen Macdonald use?

They and them, and their publishers use the same in the author biographies on current editions. Older reviews and articles, including some written around the publication of H is for Hawk, use she.

What is the criticism of this kind of nature writing?

That the landscape becomes a backdrop for the author's own recovery. The best-known version of the complaint comes from the poet Kathleen Jamie, who described the genre's recurring figure as a lone enraptured male striding out to find himself, with the place and its creatures reduced to props. H is for Hawk is a grief memoir with a hawk in it, and the question of what the hawk gets out of it is a fair one. Macdonald is more alert to this than most, which is part of why the book holds up. Jamie is the corrective.

What did Helen Macdonald do before writing full time?

Raptor work, then the history of science. They spent years in falcon research and conservation, including breeding programmes, then became a historian specialising in the history of natural history, ornithology and animal behaviour, and are an affiliated research scholar in Cambridge's department of history and philosophy of science. Earlier books include Falcon, a cultural history of the bird, and three poetry collections; they have also written and presented documentaries for the BBC and PBS.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“Concerned with the quality of wonder.”

— Helen Macdonald, on Vesper Flights.

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