Karen Blixen arrived in British East Africa in 1914, a young Danish baroness stepping off a ship into a country she barely knew. She would spend the next seventeen years running a coffee farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills — years of drought, debt, heartbreak, and a fierce, complicated love for the land and its people. When the farm finally failed and she returned to Denmark in 1931, she carried Africa home with her the only way she knew how: she wrote it down.

Out of Africa, published in 1937 under her pen name Isak Dinesen, became one of the most loved memoirs of the twentieth century — a book about loss as much as beauty, about a place that changed her more than she ever changed it. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature more than once, and never won it; Ernest Hemingway, on receiving his own Nobel, reportedly said the prize should have gone to her instead.

Blix takes its name, and its spirit, directly from her.