Helen Macdonald is a British writer, naturalist, historian of science, and poet whose work moves between memoir, natural history, cultural criticism, and environmental thought. Across their writing, animals emerge as living beings with their own perceptions and ways of inhabiting the world, as well as figures shaped by human histories, desires, and fears. Macdonald is particularly attentive to the intimate and often unsettling relationships that form across species: the forms of knowledge produced through close observation, the attachments that grow through care and companionship, and the impulses to possess, classify or control other lives.

In books such as H is for Hawk, Vesper Flights and Prophet, co-authored with Sin Blaché, Macdonald brings personal experience into conversation with the histories of science, falconry, conservation, and extinction. Birds occupy a central place in this work, opening onto questions of freedom, migration, violence, grief, and belonging. Their writing also asks how encounters with animals, forests, weather, dreams, and unfamiliar landscapes might alter the ways we understand ourselves and our place within a densely inhabited world.

Currently a writer in residence at Atelier Mondial in Basel/Münchenstein, Macdonald will reflect during Art Taaalkssss on their lifelong fascination with birds and the interspecies encounters that have shaped their writing. The conversation will also introduce the project they are developing during their time in Basel, offering a glimpse into a new work as it takes form and into the observations, questions and local encounters from which it is emerging.