Isak Dinesen

Karen Blixen was born in 1885 in Rungsted, Denmark, into an aristocratic family. Her father, a writer and adventurer, died by suicide when she was ten, an event that shadowed her life. She studied art in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome before marrying her cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in 1914 and moving to British East Africa to manage a coffee plantation near Nairobi. The marriage dissolved, but Blixen remained in Africa for seventeen years, running the farm with increasing financial difficulty and conducting a love affair with the English aristocrat and aviator Denys Finch Hatton, who was killed in a plane crash in 1931. The same year, the farm failed and Blixen returned to Denmark. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Out of Africa.