British author Helen Macdonald poses with her Biography Award-winning book H is for Hawk as she arrives for the 2014 Costa Book Awards in London on Jan 27. [Photo/Agencies]

Macdonald fell in love with falconry when she was a young girl, and describes it as "a fascinating piece of human-animal interaction".

"It's an incredibly ancient thing. This partnership has been going on for literally millennia."

It's also a process that can lead to some inadvertent poaching as the hawk goes to work in the countryside.

"There were quite a few pheasants that found their way into my pot and I used to share with Mabel that weren't technically mine," she says.

"I live in constant fear that there's going to be a knock on the door one day and someone's going to say: 'It was you!'"

While training Mabel, Macdonald also rediscovered the work of T.H. White, author of The Once And Future King and, among other things, a book about his own, much less successful experience of training a goshawk in the 1930s.

In her book we follow the unhappy story of White's life and suppressed homosexuality almost as closely as their separate experiences training hawks.

"I still feel very conflicted in writing about him in the sense that he was quite an unpleasant character," Macdonald says.

The book's success has taken her by surprise, or as she put it: "I thought it was a very strange story and maybe only falconers would want to read it."

With reading tours and promotional trips, she has been kept very busy and she is keen to get back to her work.

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