Delia Owens

Delia Owens is an American zoologist and novelist, born on 4 April 1949 in Thomasville, Georgia. She holds a degree in zoology from the University of Georgia and a doctorate in animal behaviour from the University of California, Davis, and spent more than twenty years in southern Africa: first in the Kalahari, Botswana, from 1974, then in North Luangwa National Park, Zambia, working against elephant poaching. Three non-fiction books co-written with Mark Owens came out of those years — Cry of the Kalahari (1984), The Eye of the Elephant (1992) and Secrets of the Savanna (2006). Her first novel, Where the Crawdads Sing (2018), spent thirty-two weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted for the screen in 2022.