Delia Owens is an American author, zoologist, and conservationist. She is best known for her debut novel Where the Crawdads Sing (2018).
Owens is the co-author of three internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa, including Cry of the Kalahari.
Delia Owens was born and raised in Thomasville, Southern Georgia. She received a Bachelor of Science in zoology from the University of Georgia. Owens also holds a Ph.D. in animal behavior from the University of California, Davis.
Delia met her future husband, Mark Owens, in a protozoology class at the University of Georgia. In 1974, the couple moved to Africa and settled in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana.
Delia Owens describes their experience studying wildlife in the autobiographical book Cry of the Kalahari (1984).
Owens (with Mark Owens) won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing in 1985.
She also authored Eye of the Elephant (1992) and Secrets of the Savanna (2006).
Delia Owens has been published in Nature, The African Journal of Ecology, Animal Behaviour, and others. She was a "roving editor" in International Wildlife for over 20 years.
In 2018, her first novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, came out and became an international bestseller.
Where the Crawdads Sing is a coming-of-age murder mystery story with two timelines that slowly interlace.
The first timeline describes the life and adventures of a young girl named Kya as she grows up isolated in the marshes of North Carolina. The second timeline follows an investigation into the apparent murder of Chase Andrews, a local celebrity of Barkley Cove, a fictional coastal town in North Carolina.
A film adaptation by Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine production company was released in July 2022. By 2023, the book had sold over 18 million copies.
Delia Owens currently lives in North Carolina.
Photo credit: www.deliaowens.com
