It's A common reaction on meeting Helen Macdonald for interviewers to remark how normal she seems. That's because her award-winning book, H is for Hawk, her account of how after her father's unexpected death in 2007 she purchased and trained a goshawk named Mabel for a year, tells how the bond she established with the bird was so intense that at one point she felt she had become "part hawk".Over the last year Macdonald has been touring the world speaking to audiences who have, to her surprise, been taken and moved by her lyrical work that is part bereavement memoir, part guide to and history of falconry and part examination of the life and struggles of the novelist TH White, author of The Sword and the Stone, The Once and Future King and The Goshawk, a little known book about hisown experience training a goshawk, which was Macdonald's first read when she was eight years old.In Cape Town last week for the Open Book Festival Macdonald said, though she'd trained and flown other raptors in her life, she took up the challenge of training a goshawk, a "legendarily difficult bird", because she "knew it would be emotionally very exacting but also a huge distraction. When you train a hawk, for the first few weeks you have to be on your own. You separate yourself from your friends and you sort of lock yourself in the house with this bird and that was really solitary. There was that sense of running away, of escaping and just absorbing yourself in something that is completely other than you. Of course the problem was that the more I spent time with the hawk the more I felt I was becoming part hawk. It sounds really overblown now but it was like that. I was absolutely nuts ... and people when they meet me often get worried and think I'm going to be really dark and a bit scary."In person though she's talkative and forthcoming and not so much the mad woman in the attic alone with a bird of prey that she was eight years ago.It was in the experience of using Mabel as a means of escape from her grief at losing her father, "a lovely guy who was my best mate and who I miss to bits", that she began to think about White and what he might have been running away from when he tried to train his bird. Although by the 1960s a hugely successful author with a Disney adaptation of the Sword in the Stone and the Broadway musical Camelot, White was also a deeply troubled man - a repressed homosexual, sadomasochist and alcoholic. When Macdonald went to Texas to look at White's diaries and papers she began to realise "that he was a man who mistreated his hawk because he was a man who didn't have the tools to care for anything, including himself, and I started to feel a lot of compassion towards him. He would've hated me - he didn't think women should vote and didn't think much of them - but I think he was a very instructive person to write about. He used his hawk as a mirror . much as I did really, and both of us made the mistake of seeing the natural world as a way of proving our own needs to ourselves."Previously a research scholar at the University of Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Macdonald's unexpected literary success - she won last year's Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction and the Costa Book of the Year award - has taken her on a new journey and she now writes a monthly column on nature for The New York Times Magazine. She plans to write a book that will also explore the relationship between people and the environment because she doesn't "think there's a more important subject at the moment", but she doesn't "know exactly what form it will take".'H is for Hawk, is published by Vintage, R175. Macdonald will be in conversation with Michelle Magwood at Love Books in Melville at 6.30pm this evening...