Cal Flyn is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland. She writes long form journalism and literary nonfiction. Her latest book, Islands of Abandonment—about the ecology and psychology of abandoned places—has been shortlisted for numerous literary awards including the Wainwright Prize for writing on global conservation, the British Academy Book Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction. 

Her first book, Thicker Than Water, about frontier violence in colonial Australia, was a Times book of the year. Cal’s journalistic writing has been published in Granta, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, The Economist, and others. She is the deputy editor of the literary recommendations site Five Books, and a regular contributor to The Guardian. Cal was previously writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library and at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland. She was made a MacDowell fellow in 2019, and in 2022 was announced the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the UK and Ireland’s most influential prize for young writers.