Stephen King's 3 Children: All About Naomi, Joe and Owen

Stephen King shares his three kids with his wife Tabitha

Stephen King has three kids, and it’s probably not surprising that they are a talented literary bunch.

Stephen and wife Tabitha King have been married since January 1971, and have three children together: Naomi, Joe and Owen. Both Stephen and Tabitha are successful authors, so it makes sense that reading and writing have always played a huge role in the family’s life. In fact, two of their kids are now successful authors themselves.

While Stephen hasn’t talked extensively about his family life, he has made it known that some of his best work was inspired by his children and fatherhood. In fact, one of his most well-known books, The Shining, was inspired by his feeling of not being “prepared for the realities of fatherhood.” In a 2007 interview with ABC’s Nightline, Stephen talked about how he wrote books about being a dad to try to get a better understanding of it.

"The Shining, for instance, with the homicidal father, I had feelings of anger about my kids that I never expected,” he said. “I had never been led to believe by sitcom TV or movies like A Wonderful Life that it was ever possible to think, ‘Won’t this darned kid ever go to bed and let me write?’ And Jack Torrence came out of that experience. An attempt to understand that experience.”

Related: Stephen King and Tabitha King: All About Their Decades-Long Romance

In another interview with Parade, Stephen talked about how he got his kids interested in reading at an early age, mainly to keep them entertained.

“The kids would be tearing all over the house, and I’d be trying to think of something I could do with them,” he said. “One day, out of desperation, I got a couple of Spider-Man comic books. I didn’t expect much, but they went nuts for that stuff. All of them read early.” His children developed a love for reading and storytelling and each went down their own path when it came to writing.

All of Stephen and Tabitha’s children have made a name for themselves in some way. Here’s everything to know about Stephen King’s children.

Naomi King, 53

Naomi King was born on June 1, 1970. The most private of the King siblings, Naomi is also the only one who isn’t a published author. She has worked in restaurants and as a minister for the River of Grass Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Florida, and has been known as a gay activist.

According to a New York Times profile, Naomi was born with a chronic deficit of the hormone adrenaline. This has caused some medical issues for Naomi her entire life, and it also means that she’s probably one of the only people not afraid of her dad’s writing. She finds that terror is a hard emotion for her to have, so she’s never been that creeped out by her father’s horror books.

In 1999, Naomi attended divinity school to become a minister. She told The New York Times that she was influenced by her mother’s Catholic family and her father’s Christian family, and it inspired her to go down that path.

Although she hasn’t written any books like the rest of her family, Naomi has described herself as an avid reader and used to play around with writing when she was younger. In The New York Times profile, her family expressed their confusion about why Naomi doesn’t write, and she responded, “I have different stories, and those are the ones I tell. It’s just a different genre.” (She was referring to the sermons she writes as a minister.)

She also has an Instagram page that is mostly dedicated to daily prayers she writes.

Joe King, 51

Joe King was born on June 4, 1972. He is a successful author of several books, and is often known by his pen name, Joe Hill. Like Stephen, he writes horror stories.

Joe started taking a serious interest in writing when he was just a kid. In a New York Times profile, his brother Owen talked about how, even at about 8 years old, Joe would stop playing just to make sure he had time to write every day for at least two hours. It was a rigorous schedule he has kept up with for most of his life.

He went to Vassar College and then moved to New Hampshire, where he started writing full-time under the alias Joe Hill to ensure he stayed out of his father’s shadow. “I was very insecure, and I didn’t want to sell something because someone saw it as a way to make a quick buck and then have it come out and someone would say it was terrible,” he told The New York Times. In 2007, his third published book, Heart-Shaped Box, became a success, and people started to figure out who he was.

In a 2017 interview, Joe told GQ that while he was trying to make money as a novelist, he started writing and selling screenplays with Owen, something he ended up doing for quite a while.

Eventually, Joe began embracing his father’s success and the similarities between them instead of focusing only on finding his own way. In an essay on Literary Hub, he wrote, “The unhappy creator finds himself in the shadow of other, bigger artists and resents it. But if you’re lucky — and as I’ve already said, I’ve had more than my fair share of luck, and please God, let it hold — those other, bigger artists cast a light for you to find your way.”

In 2020, Joe’s horror/fantasy comic series Locke & Key was turned into a Netflix show. He has also written short stories with his father. “I mean, me and Dad are on the same team,” he said in a Men’s Health interview.

Joe is a dad to five kids. He shares three children with his first wife, Leanora Legrand, whom he divorced in 2010. He remarried Gillian Redfearn in 2018 and the couple welcomed twins together in 2022.

Owen King, 47

Owen King was born on February 21, 1977. He is also a successful novelist who has written several books, as well as a TV producer and a graphic novel author.

Stephen’s youngest son, Owen attended Vassar College and then did the MFA program at Columbia University School of the Arts, which is where he learned “to write the kind of fiction that I aspired to write,” according to an interview for the Center for Fiction.

Unlike his brother and father, Owen doesn’t write horror stories. And while he is considered a successful author, he’s not quite as well-known either. However, this doesn’t seem to bother him. Owen told The New York Times, “I think my brother’s and father’s drive for success is greater than mine. I just want to sell enough books to be able to justify continuing to write.”

He also told the outlet that he was more exposed to his father’s intense fame than his older siblings since he didn’t go to boarding school, and expressed his wish for a more private life than his family had when he was growing up. “I want to be as successful as I can be while still living a very private life and I think my ambition is probably a little bit limited by that desire,” he said.

In 2017, he collaborated with Stephen on Sleeping Beauties, a thriller/fantasy novel. “We really did do it for fun,” Owen told Entertainment Weekly. “We didn’t know if it would be any good or that we would be happy with it. I was really excited that we could have this time together to talk and to work on something, even if it was just for a drawer.”

Owen has also worked with Joe on a variety of different projects, but the two don’t seem to feel much sibling rivalry toward each other. In a 2013 interview with Vulture, Owen said, “It’s easy to read Joe and just be a fan; I don’t feel competitive. We’ve written together a little bit, and when we write together we merge pretty seamlessly, but I don’t feel like our writing voices are that similar.”

Owen is married to author Kelly Braffet and they live in upstate New York.

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