Assigning owner when populating with ckanapi

I'm using the CKANAPI as Sysadmin in a python script to batch populate from an inventory spreadsheet (200+ data sets). I need to be able to assign data sets to specific ckan users, but there doesn't appear to be a mechanism to do this. Assigning "author" in create_package simply gives a text attribute.

Am I missing something? This might also server as a feature request.