About Watt
Raised where the woods and water were never far away.
Novelist, screenwriter, and essayist from Mobile, Alabama.
“The place is never background. It is part of the story.”
Watt Key grew up in Point Clear, Alabama, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, in a family where books, storytelling, fishing, hunting, boats, storms, and the outdoors were part of daily life.
He came to writing sideways. He was working as a computer programmer in his twenties when he first went into the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, leased a piece of high ground deep inside it, built a cabin out of driftwood, and started putting the place on paper — hoping, as he has said, that someone would find value in what he made.
His debut novel, Alabama Moon, was published to international acclaim in 2006. It won the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award and the Parents’ Choice Gold Award, appeared on TIME Magazine’s list of the 100 best young adult books of all time, and was translated into eight languages. In 2009 it became a feature film starring John Goodman.
Nine books have followed — survival novels and Southern thrillers, a memoir in essays, and a book of true stories about the swamp. He writes for adults and for young readers, and does not think of them as separate jobs. Horror for mature audiences appears under the name Albert Key.
He lives and works in Mobile.
Appearances
Watt speaks at schools, libraries, book festivals, and conservation and outdoor groups across the Gulf South and beyond.
Request an appearance →Press & media
Interviews, review copies, and photography requests go through the general inbox.
info@wattkey.com →The short version
One writer, several rooms.
Novels — eight, from middle-grade survival stories to Southern coming-of-age fiction.
Nonfiction & essays — Among the Swamp People and Bay Boy, both from the University of Alabama Press.
Screen — Alabama Moon adapted as a feature film; screenwriting and adaptation work ongoing.
Horror — published as Albert Key, for adult readers.
See all the books →