Country files: nature writers on the books that inspired them

Robert Macfarlane, Helen Macdonald, Kathleen Jamie and other contemporary writers choose the books that made them fall in love with the natural world

TH White’s tragic and beautiful memoir of his attempts to train a young goshawk in 1936 is a story that works in counterpoint to my own in H Is for Hawk, and it still tugs at my heart. It wasn’t just a literary inspiration. Deep down it fuelled my own compulsion to train a goshawk after my father’s sudden death. When I read it as a child I understood that it was about a man running to a hawk to escape from something. Back then I didn’t know anything about White’s violent, loveless childhood, nor his struggles with his sexuality. I didn’t know why he was running. But I knew he was hurting. And when my father died and I was hurting too, some part of me remembered that a goshawk was something to run away to.

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