H is for Hawk true story: Is the new Claire Foy film fact or fiction?

Billed as a biographical drama, H is for Hawk tells the story of Helen Macdonald (who wrote the memoir of the same title on which the movie is based) who adopts a goshawk in order to assist the grieving process after the death of their father.

The film features The Crown and Wolf Hall star Claire Foy as Helen, who appears alongside Brendan Gleeson as Helen's father, Alisdair Macdonald, and Lindsay Duncan as Helen's mother.

Adapted for the big screen by novelist and award-winning screenwriter of Room (among others) Emma Donoghue, H is for Hawk is directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, who previously worked with Foy on the second season of The Crown.

But just how much of the story is true? Read on to find out how much 'bio' is really in this new biopic.

H is for Hawk true story: How much is fact vs fiction?

Helen Macdonald's memoir, H is for Hawk, serves as the basis for the film.

While many of the events are true (Helen's father really was called Alisdair and he really was a photojournalist), much of the plot mirrors that of TH White's novel The Goshawk, which similarly follows White's own experience attempting to train a goshawk after his own personal suffering in the 1930s.

Macdonald opened up about this connection in an interview with The Guardian in 2014, explaining: "The backbone of the book is a memoir about that year when I lost my father and trained a hawk [but] there are also other things tangled up in that story which are not memoir. There is the shadow biography of TH White, and a lot of nature-writing, too. I was trying to let these different genres speak to each other".

In the same article, journalist Stephen Moss asserts that "The Goshawk, which Macdonald had known since she was a child, becomes a parallel text within her book".

Who is the real Helen Macdonald?

Born in 1970, Helen Macdonald studied English at Cambridge before going on to work as a falcon researcher, which led to a series of books including Falcon, Vesper Flights, and – of course – H is for Hawk.

They also featured in BBC Four's Birds Britannia series, and in 2017 starred in the BBC's Natural World documentary H is for Hawk: A New Chapter.

In this programme, Macdonald trained a goshawk chick for the second time, a deliberate call-back to their memoir.

With everything taken together, it seems like H is for Hawk is a mostly accurate retelling of a difficult time in Macdonald's life – but there are certainly elements of the film which have been fictionalised, as they were when Macdonald wrote their memoirs.

H is for Hawk is out in UK cinemas Friday 23rd January.

Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.