Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk swoops on Costa Prize 2014

In the end, it had to be the hawk. Helen Macdonald’s captivating memoir about training a goshawk has already won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, and last night it added the Costa Prize for book of the year.

The Costa is a complicated award, which chooses five winners from different categories—novel, first novel, poetry, non-fiction and children’s—and then pits them against one another for an overall £30,000 prize. It’s more populist than the Man Booker—something acknowledged by the chair of judges novelist Robert Harris, who said the Booker went to novels “people think they should read”, while the Costa was for “books people want to read”. For me that’s too easy a distinction and perhaps reflects more on Harris’s often-expressed unhappiness that his own clever thrillers have never been nominated for the Booker.

When he said that, though, I knew it was the kiss of death for the best novel category winner, Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, an experimental work that combines the stories of a renaissance artist and a child of the 1960s. (Joanna Kavenna in Prospect praised Smith for her "fervent, vital, incantatory prose"). Smith, who had many disappointed fans last night, can console herself that at the end of last year she won the much cooler prize for radical fiction, the Goldsmith’s. The poetry category winner, Jonathan Edwards’s My Family and Other Superheroes, is a funny collection about growing up in Wales, but not strong enough to compete with more experienced authors. The same goes for Emma Healey’s debut novel winner, an Alzheimer’s mystery called Elizabeth is Missing, which is already a bestseller. Kate Saunders’ Five Children on the Western Front has had excellent reviews, but it’s unusual for a children’s winner to triumph.

So H is for Hawk swooped. Part memoir and part nature book, Macdonald’s work describes how the sudden death of her father led her to reconnect with a childhood obsession: goshawks. While she attempts to train her hawk Mabel, Macdonald is also taming her grief. “I was ravenous for material, for love, for anything to stop the loss,” she writes. The hawk becomes her baby, her avatar; it takes over her life: “I filled the freezer with hawk food and a stack of frozen pizzas.”

The book also contains a biographical account of TH White, the author of The Once and Future King, and also The Goshawk, an account of his own failed attempt to train a hawk. White was a tortured personality who saw falconery as a way of asserting his masculinity. Macdonald’s own account is more sensitive—she trains her hawk by treating it like a lover. Some nature writers can feel too comfortably cushioned in their own sensuousness; but Macdonald is unafraid of everyday comparisons: goshawks are “spooky, pale-faced psychopaths that lived and killed in woodland thickets”; Mabel “sucks her feathers in so tightly she seems vacuum-packed in plastic”. She can also be pithy: “To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk”.

As reported in The Guardian, when Macdonald was asked why the book had touched so many people, she replied that one reader had written to her saying it “was a book for everyone who had ever wanted to escape their lives. That might be why it struck a chord”. While the idea of a Cambridge don training a hawk might seem wilfully eccentric, it’s a story with universal resonance. It is also a triumph for the new nature writing that has burgeoned in recent years. Influenced by, among others, WG Sebald’s memorable account of walking round Norfolk, The Rings of Saturn, this genre interweaves acute descriptions of nature with history and memoir. Robert Macfarlane, like Macdonald a Cambridge academic, began this renaissance. (Next month he has a new book out on the history of nature writing, entitled Landmarks, which will be reviewed in Prospect.)

Robert Harris, who was cheered by the assembled publishers and authors when he took a swipe at the BBC’s lack of coverage of books on television, is right that H is for Hawk is a book you want to read rather than feel obliged to. That doesn’t mean it’s a comfortable read: occasionally it is disorienting and even disturbing. In fact, it is that unexpectedness that makes it so compelling.

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk swoops on Costa Prize 2014

The moving memoir about training a goshawk is a winner once more