Literary Birthday – 4 April – Delia Owens

Happy Birthday, Delia Owens, born on 4 April 1949.

Delia Owens’ Quotes

1. Where the Crawdads Sing is a mystery, a love story, and a courtroom drama, but it is primarily about self-reliance, survival, and how isolation affects human behaviour. (Bookbrowse)
2. I also believe that being a novelist is primarily being a storyteller, and that whatever messages we want to convey as a writer should not interfere with the story we tell. I tried very hard to let the story itself speak of the issues and to keep my personal opinions low-key. (Bookbrowse)
3. I loved the freedom of writing fiction. Of letting my imagination go as far as it would take me. You can always pull back, take a more conservative course. But why not soar for a while just to see what happens? A character can look, say, feel whatever works best for the tale. You can never do that with non-fiction. (Bookbrowse)
4. To me writing fiction is like riding a horse through the gate and into the mountains. You take off and are never quite sure where you will end up. (Bookbrowse)
5. In Where the Crawdads Sing the marsh, the environment in which it was shot and where I wrote it, is a character itself. The marsh is a character itself. (LibraryThing)
6. I sleep at night with a little pad of paper in my bed with a flashlight and a pen, and I wake up in the middle of the night and write something down. Something that I think is brilliant! And then when I wake up in the morning I’ll look at it and half the time I can’t read what I wrote. (CBS)
7. To me, a book is like a contract between author and reader. Books aren’t cheap, and I didn’t want anyone to feel disappointed. I wanted them to have a reason to turn the pages.(Theipaper)
8. I’ve never thought of myself as especially good at writing; I just love it, but it’s frustrating because there’s no such thing as a perfect sentence. Every sentence can be improved, which means it’s never finished. To me, writing a book is like taking a football field of Jell-O and trying to make it into a monument. (Theipaper)
9. If left on my own, I would write too much description. And I understand that’s a problem. It’s like putting too much sugar in your coffee. No matter how beautiful it is, you will eventually get sick. (Amazon)

Delia Owens is an American author, zoologist, and conservationist. She is best known for her 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing. It became one of the bestselling books of all time (selling 18 million copies), and it was adapted into a 2022 film of the same name. She also wrote about Africa in her memoirs Cry of the Kalahari, The Eye of the Elephant, and Secrets of the Savanna. They were internationally bestselling non-fiction titles. She has been published in Nature, The African Journal of Ecology, and International Wildlife, among many others. She has won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing. Follow her on Instagram.

Source for image: Author’s Website Photo credit Dawn Marie Tucker

by Amanda Patterson

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