Before she wrote Where the Crawdads Sing, Idaho-based Delia Owens co-authored three nature books (with her former husband, Mark Owens) based on wildlife research in Africa: Cry of the Kalahari (1984), which won the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing, The Eye of the Elephant (1992), and Secrets of the Savanna (2006). She's not the only author who has turned to fiction after a long career in science or nature writing. Others have alternated between the two genres throughout their working life. Here are four more authors who have had similar cross-genre success.

Edward Abbey (1927‒1989) mostly wrote about the American West. He studied English and philosophy at the University of New Mexico. In 1957 he was a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing fellow at Stanford University and worked as a seasonal park ranger at Arches National Monument near Moab, Utah. During his time there he made notes for Desert Solitaire, an autobiographical nature book that wasn't published until ...