Portal:Denmark/Selected biography/2008/7

Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (April 17, 1885 – September 7, 1962), née Karen Dinesen, was a Danish author also known under her pen name Isak Dinesen. Blixen wrote works both in Danish and in English. She is best known, at least in English, for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into highly acclaimed motion pictures.

The daughter of writer and army officer Wilhelm Dinesen, and Ingeborg Westenholz, (and sister of Thomas Dinesen), she was born into a Unitarian bourgeois family in Rungsted, on the island of Zealand, in Denmark, and was schooled in art in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome.

She began publishing fiction in various Danish periodicals in 1905 under the pseudonym Osceola, the name of the Seminole Indian leader, possibly inspired by her father's connection with American Indians. From August 1872 to December 1873, Wilhelm Dinesen had lived among the Chippewa Indians, in Wisconsin, where he fathered a daughter, who was born after his return to Denmark.