Delia Owens
Delia Owens was born on August 4, 1949, in Thomasville, Georgia, and grew up in rural Georgia with a deep love of the natural world that would define both her scientific career and her fiction. She studied zoology at the University of Georgia, where she earned her bachelor’s degree, and went on to complete a doctorate in animal behavior from the University of California, Davis. Her scientific career took her and her husband, Mark Owens, to Africa, where they spent years conducting wildlife research in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana and the Luangwa Valley of Zambia, studying brown hyenas and elephants under conditions of extreme isolation and occasional danger. Their experiences produced two celebrated natural history memoirs, Cry of the Kalahari (1984) and The Eye of the Elephant (1992), which were international bestsellers.
After returning to the United States, Owens settled in rural Idaho, where she continued her wildlife work and began writing fiction. She spent nearly a decade working on her debut novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, which was published in August 2018 when she was sixty-eight years old. The novel became one of the most extraordinary publishing phenomena in recent literary history, spending more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list and selling more than twelve million copies in the United States alone, eventually exceeding fifteen million worldwide. It was the best-selling book of 2019 in the United States, an achievement remarkable for any literary fiction and astonishing for a debut novel by a first-time novelist in her late sixties.
Where the Crawdads Sing is set in the marshlands of coastal North Carolina from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. It follows Kya Clark, “the Marsh Girl,” abandoned by her entire family as a young child and left to raise herself in the wilderness she has come to know with an almost mystical intimacy. The novel interweaves a coming-of-age story, a nature memoir, a romance, and a murder mystery — the investigation of a local man’s suspicious death forms a narrative thread that runs through the novel’s present-day sections. Owens brings to her fiction the same careful scientific observation that characterizes her nature writing; the North Carolina marsh is rendered with the loving precision of a field biologist, and the novel’s moral imagination is ecological as well as human.
Owens’s prose style is lush and unhurried, deeply attentive to the sensory textures of the natural world, and she writes with evident emotional investment in her outsider protagonist. The novel has been credited with reconnecting a wide readership with literary fiction and with fostering interest in the natural world. Its appeal crosses demographic lines in ways that few literary novels manage, and its combination of suspense, romance, and lyrical nature writing proved irresistible to book clubs and individual readers in equal measure.
A film adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing was released in 2022, grossing more than $140 million worldwide. Owens’s achievement — producing a debut novel of such breadth and popularity after a distinguished career in science — is without close parallel in recent American literary life. She has spoken about the years spent learning to write fiction after a lifetime of scientific writing, and Where the Crawdads Sing stands as a remarkable testament to the possibility of artistic reinvention at any age.
