Jeanette Winterson and Helen Macdonald

The Centre for New Writing and MLF are delighted to present Jeanette Winterson in conversation with writer, poet, illustrator and naturalist Helen Macdonald about writing, hawks, Englishness, grief and success..

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk is a striking mix of memoir, biography and natural history. The New York Times praised how it “renders an indelible impression of a raptor's fierce essence and her own with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don't notice their astonishing engineering” while the Telegraph described it as “a soaring triumph.” Critically acclaimed by reviewers and fellow nature writers, H is for Hawk went on to win the 2014 Samuel Johnson Award, the 2014 Costa Biography Award and 2014 Costa Book of the Year.

Jeanette Winterson is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. Her latest novel, The Gap of Time, is an imaginative and compelling response to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. The Evening Standard described it as “a deeply felt, emotionally intelligent and serious novel, which resists easy answers and yet expresses the hope that human beings can muddle through, and that bad pasts can have good outcomes…Pulsates with such authenticity and imaginative generosity that I defy you not to engage with it.”