Growing up in rural Georgia in the 1950s, Delia Owen was encouraged to explore nature, often venturing out to "where the crawdads sing." These childhood experiences encouraged Owens to pursue a career in zoology: she earned a Bachelor of Science in zoology for the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in Animal Behavior from the University of California, Davis.
Before her debut novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens published zoological research and memoirs about her remote work in Africa. Along with her husband, Mark Owens, she traveled through Botswana in the early 1970s to study lions and brown hyenas and through Zamibia to study elephants. She won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing. Her nonfiction articles have been published in Nature, The African Journal of Ecology, The Journal of Mammalogy, Natural History, and others. Owens currently resides in the mountains of North Carolina.
Where the Crawdads Sing, published in 2018, tells the story of a 1950s North Carolina town that accuses the mysterious "Marsh Girl," Kya Clark, of a local celebrity's murder. According to author Delia Owens, the text explores " how isolation...
