Delia Owens

About Delia Owens

Delia Owens was born April 4, 1949, in Thomasville, Georgia, and grew up with an early love of the outdoors. She earned a bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Georgia before completing a PhD in animal behavior at the University of California, Davis, where she met her future husband, Mark Owens, in a graduate seminar. In 1974, the couple moved to Africa, spending years studying lions and brown hyenas in Botswana's Kalahari Desert before relocating to North Luangwa National Park in Zambia, where they worked on elephant conservation and anti-poaching programs.

Owens published peer-reviewed research in journals including Nature and Animal Behaviour, and co-wrote several bestselling memoirs about her fieldwork, including Cry of the Kalahari (1984) and The Eye of the Elephant (1992). She did not publish fiction until she was in her sixties.

Where the Crawdads Sing

Owens's 2018 debut novel follows Kya Clark, an abandoned girl who grows up largely alone in the marshes of coastal North Carolina and becomes a suspect in a young man's death after years of being shunned by her town. Drawing on Owens's own background as a naturalist, the novel treats the marsh as more teacher than backdrop, using the natural world to frame a story about isolation, prejudice, and survival. The book spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into a 2022 film produced by Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine.

Book Challenges

Objections to Where the Crawdads Sing have focused on its depiction of sexual content involving teenage characters and violence connected to the story's central death, with some challengers arguing the material is too mature for the young readers who make up much of the book's audience. The novel has been the subject of 28 district-level and 5 state-level challenges tracked in this catalog, making it one of the more frequently contested literary bestsellers of the past decade.