A short life of the author
Delia Owens (b. 1949) was born on 4 January 1949 in Thomasville, Georgia. She studied zoology at the University of Georgia and has a PhD in animal behaviour from the University of California, Davis. She and her then-husband Mark Owens spent decades studying wildlife in Botswana and Zambia. They co-authored three nonfiction books about their experiences: Cry of the Kalahari (1984), The Eye of the Elephant (1992), and Secrets of the Savanna (2006).
Life and Career
Where the Crawdads Sing (2018) — about Kya Clark, known as “the Marsh Girl,” who is abandoned by her family at age ten and raises herself in a shack in the marshes of coastal North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s, teaching herself about the natural world, falling in love, and eventually being accused of murdering a local man — was published when Owens was sixty-nine. It was initially a slow seller, then was selected by Reese Witherspoon’s book club and became an unstoppable phenomenon.
The novel spent over 190 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold over 18 million copies worldwide. It was adapted into a 2022 film starring Daisy Edgar-Jones.
The novel’s success was accompanied by controversy: a 2010 New Yorker investigation had linked the Owenses to the alleged shooting of a poacher in Zambia in 1996, a case that remains unresolved.
Major Works and Themes
Owens writes about the natural world, isolation, self-reliance, and the violence of abandonment. Her deep knowledge of ecology and animal behaviour gives Crawdads its lyrical authority about marsh life.
Key Works
- Where the Crawdads Sing (2018)
Collecting Owens
Where the Crawdads Sing (2018, G.P. Putnam’s Sons) — true first printings bring $50–$200.