Cal Flyn is an author and journalist from the Highlands of Scotland. She has worked for the Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph, and contributes regularly to Granta, The Guardian and Prospect. Her first book, Thicker Than Water, was a Times book of the year and dealt with the colonisation of Australia and questions of inherited guilt. Her acclaimed second book Islands of Abandonment, about how nature reclaims abandoned places, was released in 2021. She was made a MacDowell fellow in 2019, and currently lives in the Orkney Islands.