Isak Dinesen

(Rungsted, Denmark, 1885-1962)

Isak Dinesen was the pseudonym chosen by Baroness Karen Blixen to sign most of her books. After studying literature at Oxford and art in Rome, Paris and Copenhagen, she married her cousin Baron Bror Blixen, and they both emigrated to Kenya, where they started a coffee plantation. He would remain there for nearly twenty years. The encounter with open African landscapes and indigenous people would fuel his storytelling life. Far from Africa (1937) was his most celebrated work, in it he recovered in his imagination what was lost in the outside world, Kenya. In 1931 he returned to Denmark, after the failure of his marriage, the drop in the price of coffee in international markets and the death of his great love, the British officer and hunter Denys Finch Hatton. He takes refuge in writing and writes Seven Gothic Tales, a book full of extravagant and amoral stories, in which his provocative desire and his irreducible desire for freedom are evident; The Danish and English editors reject the manuscript, so he decides to send it to the United States under a male pseudonym. It was accepted in 1934 and thus Isak Dinesen was born. Under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel, in 1944 he wrote The Angelic Avengers (1992), his only novel, and shortly before his death he published Anecdotes of Destiny (1983) and Shadows in the Grass (1994). She was a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize at least twice, wrote the most beautiful stories and made her life a story worth listening to.