Islands of Abandonment
A nonfiction book about the ecology and
psychology of abandoned places
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award
Winner of the John Burroughs Medal
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize,
the British Academy Book Prize, the Wainwright Prize, Italy’s Terzani International Literary Prize, and others
“Extraordinary … Just when you thought there was nowhere left to explore, along comes an author with a new category of terrain … Dazzling”
The Spectator
“A haunting look at how nature fights back… Beautiful, evocative”
The Sunday Times
“Exhilarating … A story of the extraordinary resilience of life in some of the most desolate, ravaged and polluted landscapes on earth”
The Daily Telegraph
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, has been a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction. It won her the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2022, the UK and Ireland's most influential prize for young writers.
Thicker Than Water
Cal Flyn’s debut nonfiction book explored the life story of a distant relative, Angus McMillan – an explorer and pioneer of colonial Australia, now believed to have led brutal massacres of the Gunai aboriginal people – and posed the question: Have we inherited a responsibility to atone for our ancestors’ sins? Read more
Other work
Cal’s writing has appeared in publications including Granta, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, and others. She has been writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library, Wales, and the Jan Michalski Foundation, Switzerland. Cal was made a MacDowell fellow in 2019.
