H is for Hawk By: Helen Macdonald Publisher: Grove Press Year published: 2015 Price: $15.85 Pages: 288 Photo provided to China Daily

To help cope with her grief after her father's sudden death, falconer and nature writer Helen Macdonald locked herself in the house with a large, untrained bird of prey.

A peculiar choice, perhaps, but for Macdonald, who last week won the Costa book prize, the process of training her goshawk was a form of distraction and a way of putting her world back together.

"I saw in the hawk all the things I wanted to be. They don't experience grief. They don't have attachments like we do. They're very solitary," she said in a telephone interview before the Costa prize winner was announced.

"There's a lot of unspoken rage tied up when you lose a very loved parent, and I could kind of express that through the hawk."

It was also the beginning of a long journey that would culminate in the publication of H Is For Hawk, a powerful memoir that won Macdonald the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction last November, and now the 2014 Costa Book Award.

The book emerged from the journals Macdonald kept as she worked with her goshawk, whom she named Mabel from the Latin for "loveable".

"It very slowly dawned on me that there was a story here that was bigger than just me and a hawk. It was about life and death and making sense of it all, and about our relationship to nature," she says.

She was also looking for companionship, not something you might expect from "30 ounces of death in a feathered jacket", as she describes Mabel in her book, but which she nevertheless finds, sitting on the living room floor and tossing up pieces of crumpled paper for Mabel to catch in her beak.

"I've recently discovered that quite a lot of male goshawkers play with their hawks－they just don't let on about it," she says, laughing out loud.