A book which explores grief, love and nature – as well as just how you train a goshawk you’ve bought for £800 – won its author Helen Macdonald a second leading literary prize.

H is for Hawk was named the £30,000 winner of the 2014 Costa book prize, adding to the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction that it won in November.

The writer Robert Harris, who chaired this year’s judges, said it was a book that haunted several members of the panel and was one they would never forget.

“Everybody agreed it was wonderful, muscular, precise, scalpel-like prose. It was a very clever and accomplished piece of writing that wove everything together.

“There are some books that win prizes because they demand it and then the public don’t quite get it. This is a book I think which everyone will like.”

Macdonald’s book has been hailed a triumph by almost every critic who has written about it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Helen Macdonald (left) poses with other Costa book award nominees, Ali Smith, Emma Healey, Jonathan Edwards and Kate Saunders. Photograph: Anthony Harvey/Getty Images

It tells of how the Cambridge historian, illustrator and naturalist was so overcome by grief after the death of her father that she went almost mad and decided to train the most untameable of raptors, the goshawk.

Woven into the book is a biography of TH White, who also tried to train a goshawk more than 60 years before her.

Harris said it was at the back of judges’ minds that it had already won a big literary prize but “it’s very hard to say: ‘OK, this has had its place in the sun’”.

The Costa is different to other prizes in that it pits individual category winners against each other. So the best novel goes up against the best biography, best poetry, best debut and best children’s book.

It took judges 90 minutes to decide the overall winner with support for all five of them. By the end it was a decisive if not unanimous vote, although Harris declined to go into details.

“Having been in literary prizes myself and been told I’ve come second – believe me, it’s no comfort.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald Photograph: Costa book awards/PA

Probably close was the bookmakers’ favourite to win the prize, Ali Smith’s How To Be Both, which it later emerged was runner-up in last year’s Man Booker prize.

Smith has already won the Goldsmiths and Saltire prizes but missed out on the Costa along with Jonathan Edwards’ poetry My Family and Other Superheroes; Emma Healey’s debut, Elizabeth is Missing; and Kate Saunders’ children’s book Five Children on the Western Front.

Harris praised the Costas, which began life as the Whitbread prize back in 1971, and used his speech to rebuke the BBC for not having a television programme devoted to books, a decision he described as an “absolute disgrace”. Back in the 1970s, he said, there were two programmes, The Book Programme with Robert Robinson and Read All About It with Melvyn Bragg.

“I do think they should have a dedicated books programme … the BBC owes it to books to put something back. They are the basis for so many of our movies and documentaries ... is it too much to ask?” He said the Costa prize rewarded the books people wanted to read while the Man Booker was the books people “ought to read”.

Responding to Harris’s comments, a BBC spokesman said: “We have dedicated programming like Radio 4’s A Good Read and BBC Four’s The Secret Life Of Books, run the BBC National Short Story Award, and introduced millions to new books through adaptations like Wolf Hall, the Casual Vacancy and Radio 4’s Book At Bedtime.”

The award was presented at a champagne reception at Quaglino’s in central London.

The judges included actors Dame Diana Rigg and Samantha Bond, the BBC economics editor Robert Peston, and writers Owen Sheers, Jonathan Stroud, Bernardine Evaristo, Wendy Moore and Maggie O’Farrell.

After collecting the award, Macdonald, 44, admitted feeling wobbly. “My mum was hoping I’d win. I think she put some money on me. It is never expected and I’m really thrilled and a little bit all over the place.”

Asked why the book resonated with so many people she said one reader had contacted her saying it “was a book for everyone who had ever wanted to escape their lives. That might be why it struck a chord.”

She said it had been an “extraordinary privilege” to be shortlisted and thanked her readers who she said had shared their own stories of grief.She said: “It’s made me very, very moved”.

She also revealed that appropriately she had written the book in Costa’s branch in Newmarket.

She joked: “I’m sure that when I go in again next week for a cup of tea they might even buy me a slice of cake.”Macdonald also revealed that she went to Ireland and flew a goshawk last week and she was thinking of replacing the deceased hero of the book, Mabel. She joked that the prize money could go on building a beautiful aviary in her garden.