Her first book, Thicker Than Water (2016)—about frontier violence in colonial Australia—was a Times book of the year. Her second book, Islands of Abandonment (2021)—about the ecology and psychology of abandoned places—won the John Burroughs Medal, the American Academy of Arts & Letters’ E.M. Forster Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year prize. It was also shortlisted for numerous literary awards including the Wainwright Prize, the British Academy Book Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize. Her third book, The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness will be released in 2026.

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 is a fellow of the MacDowell and Yaddo artists colonies.

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