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 a finalist for the British Academy Book Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, among others. Her third book, The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness was released in 2026 to critical acclaim. I has been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize.

Cal’s journalistic work has been published in Granta, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, The Economist, and others. She is also deputy editor of the literary recommendations site Five Books and a regular contributor to The Guardian. Cal was previously writer-in-residence at Wesleyan University, Gladstone’s Library and the Jan Michalski Foundation. She is a fellow of MacDowell and Yaddo.

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