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Blixen Karen 1885 - 1962 (77)

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.


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Out of Africa



Karen Blixen (1885-1962) was an internationally acclaimed Danish author. She was born as Karen Dinezen on April 17, 1885 in the family farmhouse near Rungsted, a town 30 km north of Copenhagen. Her father, who was an army officer and a writer, from a wealthy family of landowners, committed suicide in 1895, when Karen was 10, because he was diagnosed with syphilis. Karen studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and later took painting lesosns in Rome and Paris. At the same time she waw writing stories; at the age of 22, in 1907, her first short story was published.

In 1913 she married her second cousin, the Swedish baron von Blixen-Fineke, and thus acquired the title of barones. They moved to Africa and set up a coffee tree plantation, 10 km out from Nairobi. Blixen was diagnosed with syphilis and started treatment with arsenic and mercury, which aggravated her health. The couple did not get along due to different education and divorced in 1925. Karen had meanwhile met the English hunter Hutton and after her divorce had a relationship with him, until 1931, when Hutton died in a plane crash.

Blixen returned to Denmark and devoted herself to writing; she never went to Kenya again. In 1937, she published the novel "Out of Africa", where she describes her experiences. The book was written in English and then translated into Danish, it became a worldwide success as a flim in 1985. From the collection "Jokes of Destiny" (1958), her short story "The Feast of Babett" was transferred to the big screen and won the Oscar for foreign language film, in 1988.

In the '50s, Blixen was an established author with an international reputation. When Ernst Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, he stated that it should have been awarded to Karen Blixen. Blixen died on September 7, 1962, at the Rungstedt family estate, having had several health problems in her last years.