Caryn Dolley is an award-winning journalist and author based in South Africa.
The author of four published non-fiction books, she has focused on public and private sector issues, including corruption, and has spent more than a decade exposing South Africa’s gang networks. In 2024 Caryn won a regional award for an in-depth series on global drug kingpins and their links to South Africa, plus political suspicions circling them.
The previous year she was regionally commended for investigative work into global organised crime. In 2022 she was commended for work on transnational drug trafficking and firearms issues. She received a national sustainability award in South Africa for reporting on a developing crime crisis, the theft and smuggling of endangered plants.
As a journalist, she has covered topics ranging from South Africa’s biggest-ever gun-smuggling investigation, resulting in a threat to her life, to the country’s criminal underworld and links to state police as well as politics.
Caryn has further worked to expose how corruption and collusion within the state can lead to crimes, including murders, at street level. She has also focused extensively on how South Africa fits into the global organised crime arena. Caryn tries to dismantle stereotypical ideas about crime, especially gangsterism, in South Africa and hopes to expand her focus to include how certain apartheid-era atrocities have been covered up for decades.
She has worked as a journalist at Daily Maverick, a researcher at non-profit organisation Open Secrets, the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism, and has been deputy news editor and an investigative reporter at News24, an online publication in South Africa. Caryn has also been a reporter at titles including the Sunday Times (South Africa), as well as the Western Cape-focused publications the Cape Times and Weekend Argus.
In October 2024 her fourth book Man Alone: Mandela’s top cop – exposing South Africa’s ceaseless sabotage, was published.
Towards the end of 2022 her third book Clash of the Cartels: Unmasking the Global Drug Kingpins Stalking South Africa was published.
In June 2021 her book To The Wolves: How Traitor Cops Crafted South Africa’s Underworld was published by Maverick451. It debuted at number one on the South African non-fiction bestseller list and the following year Maverick 451 announced it sold the option rights for the book,
Back in June 2019, her first book The Enforcers: Inside Cape Town’s deadly nightclub battles was published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Caryn enjoys painting in her spare time. She is proudly appalling at it.
