Thomas then left Karen completely in charge of the farm.įinch Hatton started to live at her house in 1924 during his infrequent trips to Nairobi, and she was officially divorced from Bror the following year, after which she returned to Denmark for 12 months.īlixen and Finch Hatton saw more and more of each other as he used her home as a base for his safaris from 1926, and she took her first trip in his aircraft in 1930.

Gaining a separation from Bror in 1921, Karen Blixen took over the management of the coffee farm with the help of her brother, Thomas (1892-1979), only to see the coffee factory burn down in 1923.

In 1918 she met Denys Finch Hatton (1887-1931), an English big-game hunter, and returned to Denmark for about 18 months in 1919. The Karen Coffee Corporation was established in 1916 and the couple bought a second, larger coffee farm on the western side of the Rift Valley. Together they travelled to east Africa, where they started a pioneer coffee plantation near Nairobi. In 1914, Blixen married the Swedish baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke (1886-1946), a second cousin. However, it is her memoir of her coffee farm adventures, ‘Out of Africa’ (1938), which made her name known around the world. Blixen’s first book, ‘Seven Gothic Tales’, was published in the US in 1934 and became a huge success. Her first short stories were published in magazines in 19. Karen Blixen was born on 17 April 1885 at Rungstedlund, the Dinesen family estate north of Copenhagen. Many contend that at the time the academy was biased against ageing candidates. The author of ‘Out of Africa’, ‘Seven Gothic Tales’, ‘Babette’s Feast’ and a host of other books and stories was long considered by Danish and international literature experts to be a worthy addition to the select list of Danish writers who have won the Nobel Prize for literature – Johannes V Jensen, Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan – but it was not to be.īlixen died in 1962, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. That year’s prize went to French writer Albert Camus, and Boris Pasternak and André Malraux were the other shortlisted authors.īlixen (1885-1962), who wrote under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, was also nominated for the 1954 Nobel Prize won by Ernest Hemingway. The released archives of the Swedish Academy, the ‘Prize Awarder for the Nobel Prize in Literature’, revealed in 2007 that Danish author Karen Blixen was one of the top four candidates for the 1957 prize. Some say the academy was ageist and that cost the elderly Blixen (photo: SAS)

Karen blixen denys finch