Karen Blixen

Born Karen Dinesen on 17 April 1885 into Danish nobility, she later became Baroness von Blixen-Finecke and lived in Kenya, where the unraveling of her life there became the material for Out of Africa. She wrote under several names - Isak Dinesen in English, Tania Blixen in German, and the odder Osceola and Pierre Andrézel - and her Seven Gothic Tales made her name in Denmark and the United States. "Babette's Feast," one of her stories, became a film that won an Academy Award, as did the adaptation of Out of Africa. She kept writing story collections through the decades: Winter's Tales in 1942, Last Tales in 1957, Anecdotes of Destiny in 1958, and Ehrengard in 1963, a year after her death on 7 September 1962. The Nobel committee circled her repeatedly but never landed, afraid of appearing to favor their own region.