Cal Flyn with Dan Richards for The Savage Landscape

Cal Flyn returns to Edinburgh to celebrate The Savage Landscape - a brilliant investigation of our relationship to the natural world. Cal's previous book, Islands of Abandonment was a Sunday Times Bestseller, winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, shortlisted for The Baillie Gifford Prize, Shortlisted for The Wainwright Conservation Award, shortlisted for The British Academy Book Prize.

Cal will be joined by the always-brilliant Dan Richards, author of Overnight. It should make for a fantastic and insightful evening.

This book takes us into the wild - deep into dark forests, to the top of mountains and into the heart of deserts. It addresses our deep yearnings to be awed and inspired by landscapes that remain beyond our reach and examines what nature gets up to in the absence of humans.

In 10 chapters, each loosely structured around a visit to some of the world's wildest and most invigorating landscapes, the book asks provocative questions about the nature of wilderness and how wild places might best be appreciated or preserved.

These locations have been chosen for their physical beauty, their perceived isolation, and the moral or emotional complexity of the human stories that can be found there. In this search for wilderness, we will meet ascetics in search of theophany in the desert; lonely shepherds seeing off wolves under the stars; missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle; wise lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks.

Cal Flyn is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland. She writes creative nonfiction, literary criticism, and long-form journalism. Her first book, Thicker Than Water, about frontier violence in colonial Australia, was a Times book of the year. Her second book, Islands of Abandonment - about the ecology and psychology of abandoned places - has been shortlisted for numerous literary awards including the Wainwright Prize, the British Academy Book Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction. Cal's journalistic writing has been published in Granta, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, The Economist, and others. 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.

Dan Richards is the co-author of Holloway (with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood), and the author of The Beechwood Airship Interviews, Climbing Days, Outpost and Overnight. Only After Dark, a BBC Radio 4 series about the nocturnal world, was broadcast to acclaim in 2022. Dan has written for the New York Times, Guardian, Economist and Esquire.

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