'I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills ... Up in this high air you breathed easily ... you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be"

Karen Blixen was born in Rungsted, Denmark, in 1885. After studying art at Copenhagen, Paris and Rome, she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, in 1914. Together they went to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation until a collapse in the coffee market forced her back to Denmark in 1931.

Although she had written occasional contributions to Danish periodicals since 1905 (under the nom de plume of Osceola), her real debut took place in 1934 with the publication of Seven Gothic Tales, written in English under her pen name, Isak Dinesen. Out of Africa (1937) is an autobiographical account of the years she spent in Kenya. Most of her subsequent books were published in English and Danish simultaneously, including Winter's Tales (1942) and The Angelic Avengers (1936), under the name of Pierre Andrezel. Among her other collections of stories are Last Tales (1957), Anecdotes of Destiny (1958), ' Shadows on the Grass (1960) and Ehrengard (1963). All of these books are published in Penguin.
Baroness Blixen died in Rungsted in 1962.