[close] Karen Blixen - in full: Karen Christence Dinesen, Baroness Blixen-Finecke - wrote as Isak Dinesen, Pierre Andrézel, other pseudonyms: Tania Blixen, Osceola, etc.
A Danish writer, who mixed in her work supernatural elements, aestheticism, and erotic undertones with an aristocratic view of life, Blixen always emphasized that she was a storyteller in the traditional, oral sense of the word. She drew her inspiration from the Bible, the Arabian Nights, the works of Homer, the Icelandic Sagas, and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, who was her great fellow countryman. She wrote in English and in Danish.
Baroness Karen Blixen was born in Rungsted, Denmark, into a well-to-do patrician family. She was the daughter of Ingeborg Westenholz Dinesen, and the writer and army officer Wilhelm Dinesen, whose adventuresome spirit and storytelling talents influenced deeply Blixen's imagination. She spent her childhood on the family estate in Rungsted. Throughout her life Blixen's outlook and manner were unabashedly aristocratic. [close]