Delia Owens Books in Order

If you want her fiction first: Where the Crawdads Sing
If you want her Africa story from the beginning: Cry of the Kalahari → The Eye of the Elephant / Survivor's Song → Secrets of the Savanna
If you want elephants and conservation work: The Eye of the Elephant / Survivor's Song → Secrets of the Savanna
If you want one book to sample her nonfiction: Cry of the Kalahari

Delia Owens was born in southern Georgia and grew up in Thomasville, riding horses and wandering the woods. Her mother liked to tell her to go "way out yonder where the crawdads sing," and that feeling of heading deeper into the wild stayed with her for life. Long before she published a novel, she saw the natural world as company, teacher, and home.

She loved writing early, too. In sixth grade, at a small Georgia school, she won a writing prize and started to think she might someday become an author. For a long time, though, science came first. She earned a zoology degree from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in animal behavior from the University of California, Davis.

Then Africa changed the scale of everything.

In 1974, Owens and Mark Owens drove deep into Botswana's Central Kalahari to study lions and brown hyenas. They lived there for years in a bare-bones camp, often far from other people, learning the habits of animals that had rarely seen humans. The work was serious science, but daily life could also mean drought, storms, fire, and lions close to the tent.

That stretch of life became Cry of the Kalahari, the book that introduced many readers to her clear, close-up way of writing about wilderness. The book won the John Burroughs Award for nature writing, and she and Mark Owens went on to write The Eye of the Elephant and Secrets of the Savanna about their later work in Zambia. Those books follow elephant research, anti-poaching work, and the hard practical question of how people and wildlife can survive in the same place.

Across all of them, Owens keeps coming back to the same things: isolation, survival, female social bonds, and the pressure that wild places put on every living creature.

Her path back to fiction took time. While she was at university, reading A Sand County Almanac showed her that writing about nature did not have to stop at description, it could carry feeling and story too. Many years and three nonfiction books later, she finally tried the novel she had been circling for decades.

That novel was Where the Crawdads Sing, her fiction debut, and it took the better part of a decade to write. Set on the North Carolina coast, it follows Kya Clark, a girl who grows up largely alone in the marsh and later becomes the focus of a murder investigation. Readers often come for the mystery, but stay for the lonely, vivid marsh world Owens builds around Kya.

Owens writes best when landscape is not just scenery. In Cry of the Kalahari, readers get the roughness and wonder of fieldwork. In The Eye of the Elephant and Secrets of the Savanna, they get elephants, danger, and conservation under pressure. In Where the Crawdads Sing, they get a mystery, a coming-of-age story, and a lifelong nature writer trying fiction without leaving the wild behind.

After her years in Africa, she lived for a time in Idaho. She now lives in the mountains of North Carolina. That feels fitting for a writer whose books keep returning to the same idea: people are shaped, for better and worse, by the places that raise them.